Posted on 12/04/2019 3:29:58 AM PST by ShadowAce
Tech Ping
forgot the most important part
How much $$$
Ping
My son is an aerospace engineer and his entire company uses Linux. He taught it to himself.
sudo root
Our mainframe is Linux.
I was a Unix admin for 30 years. Specialized in AIX, HPUX and Solaris depending on the account I was working on. I was certified in Red Hat but never had to do much with it.
The last 10 years I worked on an account where the customer - the customer! - requested that the admin staff be comprised of 7 senior admins. They were willing to pay for senior, experienced, competent admins. It was a dream team. We could do and fix anything with ease with no drama. It was a pleasure to go to work. The we had to hire a girl.
Ping!
I work for a large organization. Large enough that the admin tasks mentioned in the article are separated into different teams.
We have a networking team, a Windows team, an Open Systems team, a backup/recovery team, two different storage teams, etc. Makes my job a lot easier.
Oh, and I get compensated quite well for what I do.
I started my career coding COBOL for mainframes, transitioned to installing HPC clusters around the world, taught myself Linux, and am now a Linux admin, certified by Red Hat.
That's why they are referred to as Lusers.
"An SA friend of mine once said, "You know, this would be a great job if I just didn't have to interface with users."
A Basil Fawlty quote for sure.
Good article. However, in my last position we had one Linux sys admin (80/20 Windows environment), and he is NOT overworked. One, the Linux systems were not touchy and “just worked”. Two, we had competent (usually) network and firewall people who fixed more than they broke. Three, there was adequate support on the apps side. I worked on the Red Hat TSM backup server, but also the appliance/SuSe Linux setup, knowing precious little Linux, but enough to hold up my end of the App.
Biggest headaches, people who would not accept that their app issue was not the Linux admin’s OS Issue (often after patches), and oddball boxes. On my side they were the numerous Novell Netware servers still in use at branches. For him it was a legacy app running on a handful of Solaris servers.
All in all, he complains about his job, but he really isn’t too stressed out.
Our Windows team is about twice the size of the Open Systems team. We have about 2000 Linux servers (>2000 windows servers) and 5 linux admins. We are not overworked in general, but there are times when we could use another person or two on the team.
I was a Jack of all trades. At Microsoft I supported the people who supported Windows, but also the support personnel for all of the other various technologies. So there was the Token Ring integration team, and the AIX team, the Oracle team and the SAP team (among many others). Their focus was on systems integration and my job was mostly hardware support.
Later I worked on campus for MSNBC. I did desktop support for the newsroom, but was also tasked to provide support for the Mac machines that the art department used. No one else wanted to support them because no one else understood them (remember - this was a Windows shop) and I was low man on the totem pole - but I didn’t mind.
After the .com bust I went to work for a power utility - another Windows shop. After a few years they hired a director who came from an insurance company that was heavily into Macs. He wanted to see Mac use expanded but, incredibly, got pushback from his own people. The sys admins were resistant because they didn’t know Macs - and didn’t want to learn. They cited the lack of interoperability between Macs and Active Directory and prevailed - over the IT director!
Then we had an upper IT manager who came from Amazon where (apparently) Linux desktops are prominent. He tasked me with writing a white paper on integrating a Linux FOG (Free Opensource Ghost) server into our network. I knew nothing about Linux other than having toyed with a few distros of Ubuntu and Mint.
I built a POC server in a test lab and submitted a preliminary report on the concept to the manager. He was enthused and ignored my advisories about introducing what essentially amounts to a DHCP server into an established and defined environment. Even though I was green-lighted (by the manager) to put this server on the corp net I reached out to the manager of network services to ask his advice. And opened the inevitable can o worms.
The network manager prohibited the IT manager from placing the Linux server on the corp net and a clash soon followed. I mostly skirted the drama but ultimately got to be the fall guy in the ensuing war of egos. The FOG project was scrapped.
As far as I know they never have introduced a production Linux machine into their environment and that’s the closest I ever came to being a Linux sys admin.
“ forgot the most important part
How much $$$”
I’ve was a (primarily) AIX admin, then Sr. AIX admin, then lead, then architect. My last boss (at a large retailer, working in their multi-billion dollar online unit) was determined to turn me into a Linux admin. The thing is, they are all over the place and a dime a dozen. I was getting downtown Chicago pay while living in Green Bay, WI because good AIX people are hard to find. No way that happens if I were a Linux admin as you can find them anywhere.
My experience during our on-call rotation is that 90% of the problems were with the Linux platform. Specifically, hardware failures. The Intel based machines are simply inferior when it comes to reliability and service compared to the big iron.
I know my way around Linux and could easily get an admin job, but why? I make much more money being the specialist than I would being the commodity.
My current gig is even better as I don’t have any on-call at all, no baggage week to week, and I get to help people migrate to and use the new fancy hardware they just bought.
My $.02
This is true of any job, even where I work now!
I am a “girl” in IT but take full and extreme interest in it and always have. I can see why people cringe when they have to talk to a female in tech. I’ve run into several affirmative action hires and that is it.
It’s embarrassing! In my own place of work, they promoted a woman who is my age to “technical specialist” but she doesn’t know a damn thing about computers and, here’s the rub, has no interest in them either other than her increased paycheck.
The extent of my Linux stuff is to update RPIs running Jesse light every three months or so by SSHing in via Putty. They run our signage/monitors which direct people which buildings/conference rooms to go to. At one time I was grepping unix boxes but that was a loooong time ago.
They hired another woman her who is actually GOOD (we both came from the private sector) and she is now doing the WSUS stuff, AV, VDI and SQL stuff.
They stuck me with a wonky proprietary application and virtual servers it runs on that runs the 911 system and anything to do with Sheriff stuff. The previous dude retired at 55 and got the heck out of NYS.
This has always been the biggest issue introducing linux services in the network. The microsoft folk freak out over anything that might put their server proliferation at risk. Frankly it annoys me no end.
When the first big virtualiization push was made at the company I worked for, it was really pretty funny. To the PHB's they'd see the windows team being able to get 20-30 to 1 consolidations, while the unix team I was on was lucky to be able to put 4 or 5 VMs on one server. We had cases where the only reason we went with the VM as opposed to dedicated hardware was some of the neat things you could do to move them around, and avoid hardware downtime. Of course, what the PHBs never seemed to grasp was that our systems were actually doing things that required memory and cpu, which is why you really couldn't effectively virtualize them.
On the other hand, the windows boxes were all essentially single-task systems running a single underutilized service (often with multiple servers performing that same underutilized service). I always wanted to ask the ones that were so happy with how much consolidation you could do with windows servers, if they were equally happy about all of the huge costs all of that massive number of windows servers that were apparently doing next to nothing had run up over the years.
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