I came across this article and was wondering if it really is this bad or is he just a complainer? I'm looking to become a linux admin within a year from now. Ive already invested alot of time and effort into it and don't really have anything else going for right now. There are many things I dont like about this entire field including sitting all day (I like to be active), the daily updates and changes to the kernel, patches, tons of gotchas between distros and between versions/kernels, and overall the fact that it involves about a zillion things together, literally ENDLESS. However, its a job and pays well and I never really made much money. I'm still in my 20s but don't have any formal experience working with linux. Everything Ive learned has been self-taught and currently enrolled this year to consolidate my efforts. It is Redhat based and that is what I see most enterprise are shifting towards. I'm highly motivated but lately after looking at what jobs require, it does seem daunting. Any admins willing to share their experiences?

Thanks,
Shawn

http://verbosevomit.wordpress.com/20...administrator/

It's mostly irrelevant TBH. An environment is as good or as bad as you make it. And if you don't make it yourself, it's just as easy to inherit a bad windows environment as a bad Linux one. I suppose it's fair to say that with AD and the likes, there are more defaults that provide a turn key environment with centralized auth etc, but there are plenty of centralized auth systems that linux can use (including AD) and I've *never* worked anywhere where there hasn't been one.

Cabling? How on earth does that relate to Linux unless someone originally wanted to do things on the cheap and so picked the "free" os and a bunch of people who are shoddy and slap dash at their work.

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What the guy actaually says is that the companies where he worked as Linux admin did not have a good, well-structured environment.
I fail to understand how he can blame that on Linux??
Those 14 points on his list with things that were wrong in the evironment where he was sys-admin are all things to be taken care of by - Sys-admin!

And as for the "Linux not good for desktop":
Well, I've read about that many many years now, pretty tiring.
Personally I've used only Linux for the last 10 years, both as employed and as consultant.
It has made my life easier, it assists me at work.
"Linux not good for desktop" is a mantra that probably was correct 15 years ago - but this mantra hasn't been used that long, it came to life when Linux actually had become very good for desktop use thus competing with the "normal" system...

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I thought for a second when reading that his problems could be changed by him being the sysadmin but he claims that his superiors were controlling what he could or could not do. I think he mentioned how all clients were mounted via samba and that he still had to use NIS through samba or something. Not really sure. But that can be understandable...not being able to do your job can be frustrating.

As for linux being a desktop, Ive had it for almost 2 years, and I love it. Its robust, solid, secure, fast, because its RAW. It does everything I need. If I need photoshop or want to play doom2, I'll just go to my windows PC but for work, internet and serios business, Linux is a god-send. And I dont just mean desktop as in point and click. I love using the terminal to manipulate what I want done, and I like being able to open multiple terminals at once. The GUI is there for its purposes (internet, gedit, openoffice, evince, etc). I can't wait to land a job somewhere or do a job somewhere where I am to complete my task(s) using the terminal with no GUI, the old fashioned way

Its been a few years for me, but that bears many resemblances to my experiences. What he forgot to include was superiors who make policy decisions that affect the technical and security environment negatively yet still insist that things work a certain way and be secure. Also if you work in a small company, you will be among the first laid off in times of economic crisis because no one really understands precisely what you do. You can also look forward to being on call nights and weekends should the servers have a problem.

What have you moved on to doing if you don't mind me asking? Just curious as I like to know what people end up doing after that or if they continue to do it.

I live in a town that doesnt have alot of linux shops. When i got to my late 40's no one would hire me for a linux job, i was too old to compete in such a small market. Its really my fault tho, if you dont make the move to management or sales (at worst) by about 40 or so you are toast. The last technical job i had was in 2005 doing windows support and sewing machine software support and testing.

Yeah it sucks how corporatism really is. Its just a group of people who don't give a crap about you, they just write rules down and figure anyone over 40 is useless. I'm 29 myself and know I dont have much longer to waste and I wasted a lot having all these ideas. Everyone over 40 tells me the same thing. If you don't get your act together by 40, you're TOAST. I'm not even sure I want to do this but I don't have anything else going for now and don't mind doing it at least for a couple years before I get into something better like you mention. I know I wouldnt want to do this for longer than about 5-7 years anyway. I'm more of an entrepreneur myself but I need to make money now and this field doesn't seem all to difficult for me, I sort of have the "knack" for it (been messing with computers for 16 years), even tho I don't see myself doing it for too long.

I have a friend thats 62 and no one even looks at him for a job. It's really messed up.

And did you read his point 7 in Why not Linux on desktop:
Has this guy ever been close to Linux system? No command-line??

As for the discusision about age, I'm sad to hear that.
I honestly believed that this "useless after 40" was related only to Sweden or possibly Scandinavia, but obviously not. It's really weird

- Virtually no central authentication. At most there might be a NIS box out there that might provide central logins to some boxes but usually these boxes don’t make up even half of the infrastructure.
NIS/ldap/AD, I have seen it in multiple environments.

I have to admit it is not that common. I think it really depends on the goal of the project. I believe alot of sysadmins use SSH with public/private keypairs.
Setup it up once, works forever

- Lack of Monitoring – While Windows shops usually have overly expensive products for monitoring, most Unix shops I have experienced are lucky to have anything. Only one position I’ve held had a Nagios setup.

I can't believe this. I have seen Nagios in alot of places. And expensive monitoring tools as well.

- Bad Naming Schemes: In fact, no naming schemes at all. Rather, machines are named after your favorite cartoon characters, musicians or superheros. The names of boxes have no standard and do not communicate location, purpose, or OS.

In smaller companies this is certainly the case. I believe that this is more due to Linux not being used by end users, while Windows hosts are more likely for that purpose.
Like a printserver, fileserver, Remote desktop farm, ...
In these small environments there is mostly 1 admin. So he knows all the names.

- DNS: Even with all the “cute” hostnames, virtually none of them end up in DNS, so everyone ends up with huge /etc/hosts files or they pretend they are uber-1337 and just remember what IPs go to what.

Totally untrue.
DNS is something almost everybody sets up.
Even in a small environment or at home (with maybe 2 or 3 hosts) you find dns setups.
He's probably working in legacy environments.

- No Centrailized patching

This is certainly true.
Linux systems are not that oftenly patched as windows systems.
In Windows you actually have to do this each month if you don't want to be on the news(of course this is a bit exaturated ).
Some companies have wsus on windows.

Most admins do it manually in linux.
yum update -y and you are done(and reboot if kernel update).

- No OS standardization - Shops are too often a mishmash of Redhat and Solaris. That I suppose, I can deal with. Other shops allowed their Admin and/or Devs to have way too much freedom. You’ll stumble across FreeBSD, Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora, CentOS, and this list goes on. You jump from box to box having to deal with new locations for config files, different ways of manageing Apache and other services, different ways to do package managment, and thousands of little “gotchas” that happen on one distro but not the others.

I see alot of companies are moving from Solaris to Redhat. And mixing those 2 is not that bad. It is just a different operating system.
However, although I love working with linux I have to agree that each distro doing their own thing with the config files is a frustration to me as well.
There is a LSB(Linux Standard Base) for this and even that seems to not cover enough to prevent this mess.

That different distros have different package management tools can be because the structure for packets is totally different.
For example Gentoo: this is a source based distro. rpm, ... just wouldn't work for such a distro.

- Instead of fixing problems, they are often worked around with crappy perl or bash scripts

Not on my watch I want a fix. Not a workaround.
Maybe in the first place I implement a workaround to assure the system is down.
I create a ticket and followup later for the fix.

- Too many people, usually developers who have no understanding of the OS, having root and/or sudo access
True.

- Crappy password policies, if any at all.
Yes I can't recall alot of people using it. However my point again earlier that Linux machines are mostly not used by end users.
And I only use pub/priv keypairs, so do alot of other admins.

- Shoddy Documentation, usually slopped together in some crappy wiki. I love wikis. Lots of very professionally done wikis exist online. But I’ll be damned if wiki’s internal to a company are ever top notch. People just slop pages together, organization via namesspaces rarely takes place, it’s always a disorganized mess. What’s worse is that wikis usually exist only to supplement what isn’t in an endless array of Spreadsheets that are either emailed around to everyone, or shared off some shitty Sharepoint site.
I think this is just a general problem in the IT sector. Missing/crappy documentation/...

- Little used or no change management/ticketing systems what so ever and resistance to using them.
I believe every really technical person loves to fix issues/configure/...
Administration is "overhead"/not liked by most admins.
This is not OS dependent.

- Skimping out on support, even for old hardware that you know is going to fail eventually
Mostly due to budget.
Alot of companies don't spend on proactive work. These companies don't understand the value of proactive work.
So you don't have the time and eventually alot of the things he is mentioning are happening, be it not all at once.

- Shoddy backups, and crappy rsync scripts to work around the shoddy backups.
rsync is indeed pretty common for backups.
However I always use a backup product with central management(bacula for example).

- More often than not, cabling is more similar to the image above, than not.
I think this is a good reason to fire someone
I have seen this in far larger environments and this is a recipe for disaster.
In these cases they have network admins who should do this (or datacenter engineers).
So I don't believe this is typically for one OS.


Maybe in the environments where there is less budget(and for that reason they choose linux) some of these things are missing.
Even if there is opensource software around it might take time to implement and finetune.
This is a big cost as well.
Or there might be other priorities (probably driven by budget and/or the management).

All in all he has a point.

Hi,

If the picture on this supposedly Admin's pages is a indicator then no wonder the House IT was a mess. If my hub/switch room or even server room was ever that messy and neglected then the Boss would have security escort me out the door.

Just like a desk, messy desk means messy mind with no discipline and no ordered means to accomplish anything. I'll get to it when I can which means most likely never. Or until there are major failures or disruption(S) that do require attention.

Maybe this Admin was 3rd tier or still stuck at entry. There are intelligent ways to overcome or persuade the boss to not interfere. Bottom line, profit & lose will get their attention. As an admin it is your duty to keep things orderly and functional so tasks can be accomplished, not sitting on your hands then blame someone else.

What this guy has said only really applies to a small niche of companies, and most of his points have nothing to do with the OS.

Very small companies generally do follow his points, however there usually aren't enough servers for it to be a problem. There are only 1-2 admin guys, and often times they're actually other employees who are pulling double duty because there isn't enough work to justify one full time admin. In this case having a few different distros to take care of, or a little messy cabling, or an /etc/hosts that's 10 lines long instead of 2 lines long with a local DNS isn't really a problem. It would take significantly more time to set up a standardized, centralized system as it would to just add a new line to the /etc/hosts on 5 different computers once every 6 months, for example.

Very large companies often have full departments to take care of admin, standardization of distros, standardization of maintenance, centralized login, centralized DNS, etc., and should have very few, if any of the problems he's referring to. If they still have a lot of these problems, then somebody has some 'splaining to do...

Then you have those awkward teenage years, where a business is growing too large for the methods and practices used for the small business to be effective, yet they haven't quite moved to a centralized/standardized system either. Working for a business in this stage could definitely be a headache, and I could see most of his points being both applicable and bothersome. However I don't believe this is the norm.

If you guys think that is true, then it will be : for you !

I am well over 40, have more work that I want to handle.

Make your own job !
I have worked for myself for all but 2 years of my career.
Have been a one man band, owner of two companies with several employees, and now solo again.
I have been married, had kids yada yada.
I've had money coming at me like water from a firehose, where it is so stupid it becomes like monopoly money.
I've eaten alot of beans and spagetti too, and times where I just had a bike for transport.
But it has never ever been boring.


My rules : 1. if it isn't fun I am not doing it. 2. I won't work with or for a*sholes.

No one can know how old you are if they never meet you. (Internet -remember ?) Do your work well, efficiently and you will do just fine. Don't undercut, don't overcharge. Give VALUE.

There is one well known virtual company that has income of around 50 million, has no office, and about six 'employees / owners ' that work from home in their pajamas. What do you think they will be doing at 40 ?

Definitely not working for anyone.

The complaining about the company work environment rings false. If he doesn't like it, he should find a better place to work. If he has all those skills, he can do that. Yeah, we had a recession, but all reports are the tech industry is hiring like gangbusters for web related stuff now. So he can find better work now, if he couldn't before. It's totally up to him.

Complaining about being 40 is false. Get off your ass and provide real technical value to someone. You'll have work. Use all those skills you're supposed to have and work for yourself. If you don't have enough skills to provide independent value in the tech industry, don't be surprised if you're treated like a commodity. This isn't a cradle to grave factory job. Even people working in factories don't get cradle to grave security anymore.

H1-Bs, maybe they're a problem, I dunno. As a programmer I've always tried to sidestep the "commodity" occupations, where someone like Microsoft can hire tons of H1-Bs. I'm surprised to hear him extol Windows, considering how many H1-Bs are working on the Microsoft campus. I don't have anything against Indians, and in their shoes I'd do exactly what they're doing, but the Indian presence in Redmond is, ah, quite noticeable. I don't believe they're all naturalized US citizens, no way.

I thought Linux administrative stuff was really cool when I was learning it in my early 20s. Everything was new, and all that grunge was "fun." After 3 years of wrapping my head around all the intricacies it got old though. I wish I had gotten paid for my learning curve during that time! I was trying to do programming stuff and refused to get part time sysadmin work, wanting to concentrate on my programming learning curve. I could have made some money, while I still enjoyed the messiness of it all, and then moved on to something else later.

Messiness never ends in computerdom. You just get better at managing it, and excluding concerns or people who get in the way of what you're trying to accomplish. There's a financial aspect to that, and you do have to manage your career over time.