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
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!
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.
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.
This is true of any job, even where I work now!