Which category do you belong to?


View Poll Results: Which category you belong to?
A TRUE Admin but neutral to scripting. 0 0%
An admin who could do some scripting. 2 5.71%
An admin who hates scripting(nothing negative here, I have seen some people in this category Smilie) 0 0%
A TRUE developer, neutral to admin tasks. 0 0%
A developer who could do admin tasks up to some extent. 3 8.57%
A developer who hates admin tasks(nothing negative here, I have seen some people in this category Smilie too) 0 0%
All Rounder(could do anything ADMIN and development both) 9 25.71%
A bold person(who may know in bits and pieces for both admin and development) but dares he/she could do anything. 3 8.57%
Student with aspirations in the support side of IT 2 5.71%
Admin who sits firmly on the hardware side 0 0%
Admin who looks to script everything 4 11.43%
Admin who is also DBA 0 0%
Admin who is everything except end-user application development 7 20.00%
Admin converted from mainframe 0 0%
Operator looking to automate to keep on top of ever growing workloads 0 0%
Specialist in a non-IT field, but having to Admin own server, e.g. scientist, legal support, education, financial advisor etc. 0 0%
Amateur with no absolute knowledge of any one part of computer science, but willing to learn. 5 14.29%
Voters: 35. This poll is closed

 
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The Lounge What is on Your Mind? Which category do you belong to?
# 8  
Old 01-04-2017
"To know that one knows what one knows, and to know that one doesn't know what one doesn't know, there lies true wisdom." Confucius ;-)
# 9  
Old 01-05-2017
Donald Rumsfeld even?

There are known knowns - Wikipedia


I know my limitations too - I'm not a complete fool, some bits are missing. Smilie


Robin
# 10  
Old 02-23-2017
May you take into consideration that even the number of posts or beeing a private technical user could mean the very advanced user has all its equipment in his room to handle it. This could be a amateur or a pro. I had a friend working as a top pro, and his flat was full of servers, it went on like this, even when he lost his job. Add there are just addicts out there.
# 11  
Old 02-23-2017
Quote:
Originally Posted by wisecracker
I am a mere amateur
First off, you have long evolved from "amateur" status, so please: STOP IT! ;-)

And, to make it official once and forever:

~lights candles, dims lights, you know the routine~
Invoking hereby my powers invested in me by Brian Kernighan and his inborn son Denis Ritchie, as a loyal follower of the cult of David Korn and ordained disciple of Doug McIllroy i declare you officially to be of the status expert!

~waves wand of content (usb-stick) and scroll of knowledge (man page) at wisecracker~
Mumbo-Jumbo, Abracadabra, Kyrie Eleison, philosophus mansisses, <some more unintelligible latin here>

Well, this ritual returned RC=0, which means you are now an regular expert. Go forth and dost thou program in BASIC no more.

Quote:
Originally Posted by wisecracker
I can't really poll on this as I don't fit anywhere.

OK, after this litle exertion, i have to admit i don't fit into these categories either.

I like to script most of my work as an admin: not because of the development process itself but because this way i can assure that a certain work process is always done the same way and with a certified outcome. The key to administrating large environments is to industrialise and standardise as much as you can. Even if such a process turns out to be systematically faulty it will be done faulty in the same way on every system so it is (relatively) easy to create another script to correct that systematically.

Systems administration, on the other hand, is much more than to work on systems. It includes careful and long-term as well as short-term planning of the environment you work on. This means having a firm grasp of technological advances to expect, it means knowing the trends of usage patterns on your environment, it means taking into account maintenance- and life-cycles and so on and so on. Planning is everything and in systems administration it is even more important then some other areas.

At the same time there is troubleshooting: a systems administrator works as the "glue" between the hardware and the OS on one side and the application(-engineers) on the other. You need intimate knowledge of the systems interior (in more than one regard: from hardware to system calls to APIs, etc.) to be of help in this endeavour when not everything is working the way it is expected to do (which is more often than not the case) and you are the one to make it run no matter what.

Every admin('s knowledge) is a trade-off between fulfilling these widely divergent areas of competence (you can't excel at everything so you will specialise in one area cutting back on the other). But one needs to have at least a certain minimum amount of knowledge in any of these areas to be of any help in an admin team.

bakunin

Last edited by bakunin; 02-24-2017 at 05:17 AM..
These 3 Users Gave Thanks to bakunin For This Post:
# 12  
Old 05-24-2017
I'm not really sure where I fit in there... I'm a computer engineer, have used Linux in various forms for about 12 years or so, including updating the gentoo sparc32 port from 2008 to 2014 by hand... and I design control system electronics and HMIs for a living.

I administer my own homepage running on Gentoo/sparc64 ... and actually bothered to setup SSL there... in a slightly non run of the mill setup especially since it is on sparc.

I wish there were open source web frameworks that were well just better...I can't bring myself to acutally write any php, and I'm a bit abhorrent of Go, Lisp is a bit too left field even though I've written some before.... meh. The knock at Go is not for what it does in the language... but rather the binary.
# 13  
Old 05-25-2017
This is an interesting point and i would like to expand a bit on that, although it is only losely related to the theme of this discussion. We can put this in its own thread should the necessity arise.

Quote:
Originally Posted by cb88
I wish there were open source web frameworks that were well just better...I can't bring myself to acutally write any php, and I'm a bit abhorrent of Go,
I think the problem is that the open source movement is such a diverse crowd. This is one of its strengthes but also one of its severe shortcomings.

The reason UNIX had such a strong pull was that - at some abstract level - it was built in a very consistent way. It is difficult to describe what exactly this "consistent way" actually consists of, but when you ask long-time UNIX users you will notice that they often have developed a "gut feeling" for when a design decision, a setup, a method is "right" - and they all share the same gut feeling and come to the same conclusions about what this "right" constitutes! It has often been called the "UNIX culture" at work and this description perhaps fits as well as any others - paradigmata, "way of undertaking things" - but it definitely is there, even if it is difficult to explain what exactly it consists of. (One part for instance is the often-cited tenet that "everything is a file", but its not that alone.)

Now, this "UNIX feeling" is often dissatisfied when dealing with open source products. They look (/feel/work/...) "somehow not right" (or rather "not UNIX") and this hints to another culture being at work. That would be no problem, but in fact it is and it is because there is not another culture at work but another cultureS - lots of them! Everybody brings his own interpretation of how to make the world better to the party and - at least, this is my personal opinion - all these interpretations may have the one or other convincing part but they disagree with each other on most everything. This makes them hard to adopt and even harder to accept.

Pars pro toto: GNU-seds -i (in-place editing) option. It certainly is a "good idea" based on the fact that most times sed is used like this:

Code:
sed '<some-regexp-here>' /some/file > /some/file.tmp
mv /some/file.tmp /some/file

On the other hand one could argue that in fact the -i-option is in fact just a wrapper for exactly this changing-then-moving procedure, but hidden from the user. It is not "in place", but rather "does like in-place". You can show that easily: first, the inode number if the resulting file will change, so in fact it is not the same file but a new file by the old name. Second, if you have not been the owner of the original file you might be now, because the new file perhaps (sticky bits, etc., aside) gets your id and primary group.

All this is not "bad" in itself, but telling the user to do one thing while doing something else perhaps is. But even this would be acceptable, if this would be always the same and always misleading in the same way. It isn't, though (all implementations of i.e. awk that i know of lack the -i option), and this is why the open source world looks generally less "usable" for me than the UNIX world.

Another example: bash. bash has all sorts of fancy things built in many other shell lack - command completion, filename completion and what-not. Yes, they are all (more or less) useful and fine - but a shells role is not only to be an interactive command processor but also a scripting language. For this, there is: a rather anaemic typeset-command where lots of the features the Korn shell has are missing; no FPATH variable to put (shared) function collections into a common directory, and finally, the biggest Bourne-shell-design-bug continued:

Code:
echo foo bar | read var1 var2
echo VAR1=$var1 VAR2=$var2

ksh has done away with that nonsense - and rightfully so! But - making a wild guess - i suppose that many "new languages" (perl, ruby, phython, php, ...) have only been developed because bash left such a big itch to scratch.

Now this is why i think there are no frameworks like you mentioned: the open source community simply hasn't reached any consensus about how to design and build things and as long as this is the case and everybody starts his own framework, which works different to any other and never reaches the state of maturity necessary for a production environment (because the people potentially able to contribute rather develop their own ambitious counter-project instead of helping with this) there won't be any powerful solutions that could really change the rules of the game.

bakunin
# 14  
Old 05-25-2017
This was an no harm intended update, since that was on my mind Smilie

Quote:
Originally Posted by bakunin
I like to to script most of my work as an admin: not because of the development process itself but because this way i can assure i can enjoy my bbq while stuff does itself as it should Smilie
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