2 Jan 2010 18:33
Re: What sort of Administration?
On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 11:38 AM, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble@...> wrote: > Ben's recent post brought to mind a question I've been pondering for a while: > > How much Systems Administration do Systems Administrators actually do? > > I know that I spend the majority of my time working more on applications > rather than systems, and even when I'm working on the systems side of > the fence it's mostly storage or backups. > > Is this just me, or is it widespread? I think it depends on the size of the environment. When I worked at a .edu (< 20 servers, 150 - 200 workstations, 5000 users) the unix admins were responsible for application installation and maintenance as well. As machines got big enough that we didn't have to do silly tricks with OS components on multiple disks or on a network file system (NFS or AFS) and administration practices improved (jumpstart, distributed management mechanisms) the balance of time shifted more toward application maintenance. It wasn't that there was more app work, there were fewer students helping out as admins. The last couple years there I found myself dealing more with security issues due to the openness of the university (firewalls and disabling telnet would stifle creativity). I had to do really stupid stuff like use the twist operation in tcpd to have a perl script connect to the source of the incoming telnet connection to see if it was a wingate telnet proxy and if so assume it was somebody that was just about to install bitchx.(Continue reading)
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