OT: It's arrived!

[Dean Wilson]

On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 01:33:09PM +0000, Greg McCarroll wrote:
> I think there is a lot of it that comes down to mind-set.

I'd agree. At some point you will make a mistake and have to both fix
and justify what you did. And to be honest both are damn important -
never make a change you can't recover from and never do anything without
a good reason.

> I think from a purely technical knowledge point of view, a good/senior
> Perl hacker can become an above average sysadmin pretty easily - but
> there will still be a bit of a learning curve as they learn some
> tools, e.g. backup, that they maybe only have slightly grok'd before.

On the flip side there is nothing more annoying than someone arguing that it
must be easy as they did it on their Ubuntu laptop and it worked great for
both users. A little knowledge of Unix can be a very dangerous thing.

Oh, AND UNIX AND LINUX ARE NOT THE SAME BLOODY THING. But Bob rants about
this with more passion than I do.

> The problem is, and I think a previous poster mentioned this (Paul
> M? mst?) that there is a certain mind-set that really great
> sysadmins have.

The knowledge that it will break and it'll hurt when it does?

It sounds obvious but system administration is about systems *and*
administration (see how clever they were when they named it?) Too many
people get too tied up with the technology.

> mbm and dean wilson (who are both known to the London Perl community)
> spring to mind as two examples of this.

Thank you Mr McCarroll Sir. Always nice to be appreciated. Cash is in the
post ;)

  Dean
-- 
Dean Wilson             http://www.unixdaemon.net
Profanity is the one language all programmers understand
  --- Anon