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Date:      Sun, 24 Sep 2000 21:52:46 -0700 (PDT)
From:      "Jason C. Wells" <jcwells@nwlink.com>
To:        Haikal Saadh <wyldephyre2@yahoo.com>
Cc:        chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: So what do (unix) sysadmins do anyway?
Message-ID:  <Pine.SOL.3.96.1000924213615.28262A-100000@utah>
In-Reply-To: <20000925032828.3958.qmail@web1610.mail.yahoo.com>

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On Sun, 24 Sep 2000, Haikal Saadh wrote:

> Am I missing the obvious?

The big thing that is missing is that any system (TN. UNix. Mac) does not
run in a vacuum.  Organizations are demanding more.  Systems do need to do
maintenance.  Maintenace can be scripted in many cases, but you still need
a human (well trained, well supported too) to use the brain cells to
analyze how well systems are working. 

Coming from the environment that I do, I state that there is no such thing
as a system failure.  There are only human failures.  you can't possibly
program a computer to deal with all the faults we colud impose on a
system.  A notable fault is a malicious attack. 

I came from Univerity of Washington in Seattle.  There is a man there
named Dave Dittrich.  He is a great guy.

Read this interview on slashdot.  It is mostly about security.  Security
is only a fraction of what can involve a Sysadmins time.  Security could
also consume ALL of a sysadmins time.  There is a ton of wisdom here. 
Multiply what you read by 100 to get an idea of the scope of the realm of
system administration. 

http://slashdot.org/interviews/00/02/16/1836215.shtml

Most notably:

"This is one of my pet peeves; THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH GOOD SYSTEM
ADMINISTRATORS. There needs to be WAY MORE of them, they need to be PAID
AND TRAINED BETTER, and (to put it bluntly) they need to be considered a
critical resource REQUIRED for powerful computers on the Internet today,
not as overhead expense to be minimized."

	-Dave Dittrich on Slashdot.org

Thank you,
Jason C. Wells



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