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Date:      Sun, 24 Sep 2000 22:40:54 -0700
From:      "Crist J . Clark" <cjclark@reflexnet.net>
To:        "Jason C. Wells" <jcwells@nwlink.com>
Cc:        Haikal Saadh <wyldephyre2@yahoo.com>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: So what do (unix) sysadmins do anyway?
Message-ID:  <20000924224054.H59015@149.211.6.64.reflexcom.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.96.1000924213615.28262A-100000@utah>; from jcwells@nwlink.com on Sun, Sep 24, 2000 at 09:52:46PM -0700
References:  <20000925032828.3958.qmail@web1610.mail.yahoo.com> <Pine.SOL.3.96.1000924213615.28262A-100000@utah>

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On Sun, Sep 24, 2000 at 09:52:46PM -0700, Jason C. Wells wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Sep 2000, Haikal Saadh wrote:
> 
> > Am I missing the obvious?
> 
> Coming from the environment that I do, I state that there is no such thing
> as a system failure.

Huh. NOT! The admin's at our office spend a _lot_ of time fixing
systems that die from hardware failures. Sure, you have backups (data
and hardware backups) but you still need (1) to get the backup on-line
(it's seldom 100% automated), (2) to fix/replace broken hardware
(can't be running without on the backup for too long), and (3) to do
the inevitable little tweaks to get both (1) and (2) to really work.

With literally hundreds of heavily used UNIX-type boxes you _will_
have a small failure of one type or another every few days and you're
bound to have something pretty bad on the scale of months.

Once you get a UNIX box up and running, you can forget it... until
some hardware breaks, some user manages to screw up their stuff so bad
they come to the admin to fix it, a user wants to "upgrade" some
horendous monster of an app, etc.
-- 
Crist J. Clark                           cjclark@alum.mit.edu


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