Posted on 02/13/2020 11:30:17 AM PST by ShadowAce
I love being a Linux system administrator, but there are things about it that I don't love. No job is perfect, but someone should at least warn the newcomers of the dangers that lie ahead. Well, you've come to the right place to find out everything you wanted to know, and probably a little extra, about being a Linux system administrator. These are my experiences and might not reflect the greater system administration universe. I make no claims, promises, or guarantees by presenting these ten things I wish I'd know before becoming a Linux system administrator to you. They are in no particular order.
It's my goal to paint a realistic and somewhat humorous picture of what being a sysadmin is. I don't want to make you believe that there aren't rewards because there are. Sysadmins can make a decent living. There is often a lot of freedom to work remotely. You can often work whatever hours you please and not necessarily eight all in a row. There are some perks in that some people appreciate you for the computing genius that you are. Sometimes kind people will bring you goodies or even take you to lunch because of your awesomeness. Every job has its downsides and its upsides and system administration is no different.
Systems, I can relate to and communicate with just fine. I always know what I’m up against. I’m always in control.
Humans on the other hand, I never know what I’m dealing with.
On the AS/400, you had the option to put annoying people of the “slow user queue.”
I really liked that!
Hill.
Sh1t.
Gravity.
Bucket.
Regardless of OS
I read that all the time—I’m caught up, in fact.
Regardless of career
I don’t need to read past number 1 to see what the problem is.
So the IT guy is troubleshooting someone’s workstation and says, “Hmmm...that’s interesting.” This is IT code used when in a mixed environment. What it translates to is “What did you f***ing do to your workstation this time!”
I’ve been out of the business for over 16 years but I got hired at a bank and inherited a Novel network with Lotus Notes for email, Window’s NT workstations and an AT&T voice mail system. Had to sysadmin all of these and then had the whole Y2K non-issue to contend with and don’t get me started when every banker “had” to have a shiny new BlackBerry and wanted their email to forward to it.
Still, the best IT job I had. Software, hardware, pulling wire, punch downs, back-ups, restores, purchasing, office moves, comm room build-outs, account creations, assigning rights. No way to get bored, there was always something different to do, and then end users always found new and interesting ways to keep you occupied.
It was told to me secondhand, so take that for what it is worth.
When I was in the USN on my second Med deployment, I worked with a DEC mainframe on a special project that was recording all the flight information on our A-7 Corsairs. I was a jet mechanic, but they had me working with a rep from Detroit Diesel Allison, and one of my jobs was to read the flight recorder tapes and plot out the flight on a graph showing RPM, Temp, vibration, throttle position, etc.
All this is De Rigueur now, but back then, warplanes didn’t have it.
Anyway, when working on plotting the tape info on the PDP-11, you had to enter the variables just right, and if you didn’t it would spit back “Error-try again”.
Well, I kept making the error of some kind, and after the fifth error, instead of saying “Error-try again” it said something like “Are you in the Marines or something-try again”
When it errored again, it said “Pathetic-try again” and I just began making deliberate errors until it said “What do you have on the ends of your hands, Sh*t for fingers?”
I thought it was pretty funny, and then it went back to the standard dialog!
Good point
I'm really bored. You know how bored you get when work's going on and on and on, and nothing interesting is happening, and you're listening to a radio that picks up ONE station on FM, and it's always the station with the least records in the city, about 5, and one of them is "You're so Vain" which wasn't too bad a song until you hear it about 3 times a day for a year, and *EVERY* time it plays, the announcer tells you it's about Warren Beatty and who he's currently poking, someone you'll never sniff the toe-jam of, let alone meet, let alone get amorous with. And EVERY time someone mentions Warren Beatty, someone says that he used to go out with Madonna too, and have you seen "In Bed With.."
AND THEN, someone ELSE will say "It wasn't really about Warren Beatty, it was James Taylor" and the first person will say "What, `In bed with Madonna?'", and they laugh and everyone else laughs, and I slip out the Magnum from under the desk where I keep it in case someone laughs at a joke that's so dry it's got a built in water-fountain, and blow the lot of them away as a community Service. I figure that I'll get time off my sentence if I ever kill someone by accident who's got a life.
So visitors are getting pretty thin at the moment, and the Quick-Lime Pits are filling up rapidly, and all I've got to do is the full backups and maybe I can go home.
So, to relieve the boredom, I get some iron filings and pour them into the back of my Terminal until it fizzes out (Which doesn't take all that long, surprisingly enough), then call our maintenance contractors and log a fault on the device. Sometimes they'll send someone who knows what they're doing, but it's a lot more fun when they don't - which is about 98% of the time.
So they maintenance guy comes in, and I can tell he's NEW because the photo on his ID actually LOOKS like him, not like the head engineer, whose photo's a black and white tin-type (he's that old).
Maintenance Contractors always dress up nice, with a tie and everything because they believe that a customer will trust a nicely dressed guy with their million dollar equipment *just* because he's got a nice tie..
Because he's NEW and ALONE, he's what you call an appeasement engineer, the new guy they send so they respond within the 4 hour guaranteed response period. (Things are getting better and better) Your average appeasement engineer is about as clued-up on computers as the average computer "hacker" is about B.O, and their main job is to make sure the power plug is in and switched on, then call back to the office for "PARTS". The really keen ones will sometimes even take a cover off the equipment and pretend that they see this stuff all the time. I wonder what sort today's is...
"You got a dud terminal?" he asks pleasantly
I tell him yeah, and bring him into the control room.
"Which one is it?" he asks, confused by the fact that only one of them is smoking.
"It's the Model Three" I say, giving NOTHING away.
"Ah, the old model three!" he says knowingly, without a clue what a model three is, or which one of the three terminals it is, which isn't surprising, as I just made it up.
"We get a lot of Model Three problems" he says nodding "So what actually happened?"
Sneaky, but not good enough. I'm not going to point it out to him.
"It just went dead" I say, in luser mode.
"I see. Could you just recreate what you were doing so I can check the unit out when it's ready for operation?"
Very Sneaky. I decide to let him off the hook.
"Look, I've got to go to the toilet, there it is over there" I say, pointing at our Waffle-Iron.
"But that's a Wa..." He says, then stops. He's a beginner, and it's just possible that the company has a line of terminals that look like waffle irons. He bites.
"Sorry" he says, smiling again "for a minute there I thought it was a Model 2!"
A reasonably good save, but it won't save him.
I leave, which means he's got to take it to bits, otherwise he knows I won't believe he's worked on it. I give him a couple of minutes to get the element exposed then wander back in.
"So how does it look?" I ask, concerned-like.
"Well, I think we could have a processor problem.." he says concentrating on prying the element up.
..concentrating so much that he doesn't notice me plugging the iron in.
"Shouldn't you be wearing an earthing strap?" I ask innocently.
When he thinks I can't see, he creeps his hand over to the wiring frame and says "Well, It's just as easy to hold onto earth like this"
"But what about the risk of a cross-the-body shock with no resistor in series with you?" I ask ever-so-more-innocently
"Oh, it's ok" he says "the unit's unplug..."
*click* *BZZZZZZZEEERRT!* *clunk!*
I ring the maintenance help-desk again...
It's Rhonda
"Hey Ronda!, Ah, I'm going to need another engineer and a new Waffle Iron over here; for some reason your engineer opened up my Waffle Iron without switching it off." I say
Rhonda knows me. It's the third call and the third appeasement engineer. "You're a real prick" she says, annoyed
"Tell ya what Rhonda, why don't you come and fix it; it's a Model Three..."
When my work computer got trashed by a network pushed update to Windows 10 (from 7), I took it to our helpdesk for them to fix the video drivers. They didn't know my background in managing a big IT project.
The kid says my laptop was due for a "tech refresh" meaning a new machine. I wasn't in the mood, but asked what the new computer would be. Turns out the central buy my organization did was for crippled machines. I asked him to just fix the one I had (only two years old with lots of RAM and a decent processor).
While browsing to the enterprise folder containing the correct drivers he tells me there is no Windows 10 driver for the video. He's staring at the correct install file while telling me this. I asked him to double click "there" pointing at the executable. He says it is for something else.
I eventually surrendered and took the new laptop. I never learned why he would install the correct driver. I was on our enterprise Windows 10 "golden disk" distribution.
dating myself, but IIRC I found BOFH when he was up to issue #4
If you’re in IT, you should have known this going in...
2 & 3) Computers and networks were originally designed by some guy named “Murphy!”
6) At my last job, there was a business critical application that would only run using Microsoft Java and Windows 98, and ran on a Compaq Deskpro 386. The company that wrote the software was long out of business. They were still using it in 2017.
7) Nobody ever gets fired for bad backups. It’s the “bad restores” that’ll boot you out the door!
Mark
I am trying to arrange secret service protection for you, and for downloading your expertise in case of death or nuclear attack. Your employers should be thanking God for your industrious diligence, skill and knowledge.
Been in IT a long time...my first rule when things break
“The harder it is to find the problem... the dumber the cause for the problem”
Nobody ever gets fired for bad backups. It’s the “bad restores” that’ll boot you out the door!
The problem with the “pecking order”... is you always work for the “head pecker”
Unix is evil...
No Unix was just reversed engineer from the crashed UFO at Roswell in 47
“Backups fail.”
we used to phrase it as follows: “Sooner or later, you’ll be down to your very last working backup”
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