From: kevin lyda (kevin at domain suberic.net)
Date: Sun 23 Jul 2000 - 13:49:08 IST
On Fri, Mar 17, 2000 at 01:46:24AM -0000, Robert Sweetnam wrote:
> Now on the other hand, the students in question knew a lot more, infact
> infinitly more than me about scriting and programming which is all very
> well, as I have no or nor want any experience in said matter. But If they
> are geared towards that end of the spectrum, why the fsck are they in a
> sysadmin job.
sorry to bring up an ancient topic. i'm trolling through my mail to
find my linux counter registration. (update yours here by the way:
http://www.linux.ie/counter/ )
anyway, why would a person who knows how to do scripting or programming
do admin work? uh, that's what makes the difference between a good
admin and, well, a god. larry wall was an admin - he wrote perl to help
generate reports. my first serious unix job was at an admin contracting
company and our resident "living unix reference book" used to write
amazing scripts with awk/sed and friends to generate named zone files from
/etc/hosts (easier to maintain then the zone files themselves - zone files
have to be entered twice, once for lookups, once for reverse lookups).
he also wrote a util similar to ssh for secure remote access.
if you're admining a few boxes, then you probably don't need scripting
skills. if you're admining a serious 24x7 unix shop with a stable of
servers you either work insane hours typing in the same thing over and
over or you learn to script every mundane task that reaches your in box
more than once. granted there are lots of tools out there for automating
tasks that werent there five years ago, but the powerful ones use a
scripting language of some sort.
kevin
-- kevin at domain suberic.net "there's nothing wrong with windows 2000 that fork()'ed on 37058400 linux can't fix." -- va linux t-shirt meatspace place: home
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