Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 10:12:29 -0700 (PDT) From: Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com> To: Bill Pechter <pechter@ureach.com> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: OS Tuning Message-ID: <200106171712.f5HHCTa06935@earth.backplane.com> References: <200106170947.FAA26679@stage21.ureach.com>
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:Matt --
:
:Try and find good Unix folks these days.
:I'm in Holmdel, New Jersey and even with AT&T and Bell Labs
:laying off tons of folks Unix trained sysadmins with more than a
:minimal exposure to Linux or Unix are impossible to find.
:
:Let's get real. Universities and Colleges are not training
:Unix sysadmins. They're not getting trained in tech schools --
:which are turning out Cisco and Windows certifications galore.
Huh? Where'd you get this idea? They sure are over here! Just
look at the University of California's EECS program. Here:
http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/clients.cgi
Doesn't look windows centric to me! Looks like a fairly good mix.
And all the big servers are UNIX.
:The type of person who mucks with systems for fun is rare and
:often you just can't find them when you want them. (Want to work
:here in New Jersey at Ureach... send me resumes)
This is simply not true - you aren't looking in the right places.
Look on monster.com and other job search sites and look into university
job-fairs. It is hard to find good UNIX C programmers, but it is
definitely not difficult to find good UNIX Sysops. They ooze out of the
floor boards here in the Bay Area. There are thousands upon thousands
of people who can tune a unix box - or can learn how to tune one in
fairly short order. It just isn't the problem you seem to believe it
is. At BEST we hired two FreeBSD/Linux sysops right out of high school
and they knew more on their little fingers then the bozos that did the
so-called benchmark. It isn't rocket science - there are fairly concise
instructions on how to do things and on the BSD groups we haven't had
any serious trouble teaching newbies how to build a FreeBSD kernel,
for example.
All it takes is a little effort. Very little effort. I can't imagine
that it would be all that much more difficult in New Jersey. Anyone
who is UI-centric -- even an NT admin who can only do things through the
UI and can't get into the guts of the registry - is someone you do not
want to hire.
:That's why Solaris and SVR4 has gotten easier to tune. AT&T
:made a decision to have the boot -r reconfigure /dev and do the
:MAKEDEV automatically. Edit /etc/master and rebuild the kernel.
:Heck no, run this gui-like tool and we'll rebuild it for you and
:you can skip all the headaches... we'll even update the boot
:pointers to the new kernel for you.
What headaches? Have you ever built a kernel under FreeBSD? Have
you ever built the world? It's utterly and completely trivial. Sure,
you have to spend a little time learning how to do it, but if the point
is to maintain hundreds or thousands of machines and a person isn't
willing to spend the week it takes to learn a new system, then again...
that isn't a person you want to hire.
:Most folks forget just how Admin-unfriendly Unix was back in the
:bad old days. Need a new device driver -- rebuild and relink
:everything -- no demand loading of drivers. Compare this to
:proprietary vendor OS's of the time.
And how often did you need to build a new device driver? Not often!
While drivers can be demand-loaded today, I personally prefer to link
them into the kernel directly to get a little better crash robustness.
It takes maybe 2 minutes if you've already built a kernel, maybe 10 minutes
if you are doing it for the first time. That is hardly an inconvenience.
:Easier tuning would not be a bad thing... just it's a shame what
:passes for Admin and Operations staff these days.
:
:Most of these guys couldn't add a user to Solaris without
:useradd and admintool.
:
:Let 'em just try it with vi... and watch the fun.
:Some don't know the difference between /etc/inetd.conf and
:/etc/services.
:
:--Bill
Amen. I don't know about you, but you will never see us hiring anyone
like that. Sysops are supposed to know what they are about. A glorified
power user is not a sysop.
-Matt
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