OT: It's arrived!

[Bob Walker]

On Tue, 6 Nov 2007, Dean Wilson wrote:

> 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.
>

indeed. for instance it is always instructive at one point in your career 
to actually see what happens when you do "rm -rf /". (As a sysadmin it 
took an awful lot of willpower to actually type that anywhere near a 
terminal)
Of course before doing this you really have to be sure you can recover 
from it or dont actually care.


>> 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.
>

a little knowledge of anything can be dangerous.

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

bob mutters under his breath.
sh is not bash.
not everyone uses gcc.
do not assume a gnu toolchain.
fscking linux weenies.



>
>> 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 ;)

non-consecutive serial numbers as usual?

-- 
Bob Walker
http://london.randomness.org.uk - http://tech.randomness.org.uk
http://rwc.randomness.org.uk    - http://londonjoinery.com
for great beery justice!        - meh! bah! indeeed!