The Lost Art of System Administration
matt-rickard.com
The Lost Art of System Administration
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Re: The Lost Art of System Administration
#2> Learning how to effectively use the command line. Unix philosophy. Pipes, scripting, and tooling.
This is a complaint I used to hear about young software developers even a few decades ago. It's the same today, but those accused then are now complaining the same for the current crop of developers. I guess it is a skill that people pick up late and slowly, but they eventually do it nonetheless.
Re: The Lost Art of System Administration
#3No post body was provided.
Re: The Lost Art of System Administration
#4I recall a push of "sysadmins are just glorified janitors, we don't need them" around 2005? or thereabouts. Since then it seems there's been a lot of work put into dealing with broken, chaotic systems and how to use them anyway.
Re: The Lost Art of System Administration
#5> Learning how to effectively use the command line. Unix philosophy. Pipes, scripting, and tooling. This is a complaint I used to hear about young software developers even a few decades ago. It's the same today, but those accused then are now complaining the same for the current crop of developers. I guess it is a skill that people pick up late and slowly, but they eventually do it nonetheless.
You mean the skill of complaining?
Re: The Lost Art of System Administration
#6> Learning how to effectively use the command line. Unix philosophy. Pipes, scripting, and tooling. This is a complaint I used to hear about young software developers even a few decades ago. It's the same today, but those accused then are now complaining the same for the current crop of developers. I guess it is a skill that people pick up late and slowly, but they eventually do it nonetheless.
You mean the skill of complaining?
Definitely not. If you haven’t picked up the skill of complaining by your second programming task (be it shell or anything else), your humanity is in question.
Honing that skills can be slow.
Re: The Lost Art of System Administration
#7I recall a push of "sysadmins are just glorified janitors, we don't need them" around 2005? or thereabouts. Since then it seems there's been a lot of work put into dealing with broken, chaotic systems and how to use them anyway.
Reminds of the IBM story.
They had an IT department. Things were smooth. Nothing ever went bad.
So they sacked 50% of them thinking they do nothing but hang around... and everything went to hell.
Someone can probably point to or correlate that story better.
But essentially the human nature of business is, if something runs smooth, it needs fixing.
Re: The Lost Art of System Administration
#8I grew up with spectrums and ms-dos with a turbo and a reset button.
I feel sad for my kids who will grow up with iPads and Windows 14 PCs with not the slightest clue on how things are running and the OS shielding them from crashing the thing or running viruses for fun.
Same things for young lads that come out of university today with their degrees. They're well spoken and can recite algo theory like nothing but still have no clue what's underneath and why it works.
Have we reached that level of the civilisation that goes extinct, for forgetting how its own inner machines work?
Re: The Lost Art of System Administration
#9Isn't modern system administration very much still a thing, just with a different name: devops? I worked with a really bright (sysadmin/devops) guy that built out a FOSS configuration management service using saltstack and zabbix; a near real-time visualized platform of critical assets that also afforded a great deal of control, all from a distance.
I do very much agree that use of command line is declining, though; in general, technology - both its physical form and digital interfaces - has become more closed to the user. Really hope that changes.
Re: The Lost Art of System Administration
#10Isn't it knowing kubernetes now? Which does kinda tend to require you to also know a fair bit of "single machine" admin tools along with a whole slew of new complexity.