[ale] somewhat OT: sysadmin must-knows?

[Jerald Sheets]

On Nov 14, 2004, at 1:39 AM, James S. Cochrane wrote:

> 11) Do NOT exaggerate your experience when trying to get a job.  If 
> I'm doing a technical interview, and someone tells me they're a 
> certified Solaris administrator, but they can't explain disk slicing, 
> I'll downcheck them.  If they can't create a tar file of multiple 
> specific directories or subdirectories, I won't believe they have 
> prior system administration experience, and will downcheck them.  I'd 
> rather hire someone who shows interest and initiative and has little 
> commercial experience than someone who has commercial experience but 
> can't handle situations that weren't covered in a vendor training 
> class.  If I ask what kind of computers you run at home, you need to 
> at LEAST have a dual-boot system, if you don't have multiple systems 
> on different OS's.
>
>


You managed to hit a pet peeve of mine.  Nothing personal, but after a 
year and a half of job-hunting in ATL with clueless techie wanna-bees, 
this mentality sets me off.

A little background:

14 years tech, 5 of those winblows, 9 UNIX.  All flavors:  AIX 
primarily, down to Linux, HP, Solaris, etc.

Formed and flourished 2 Linux user groups, 2 gaming groups, and I 
currently write for Linux.com


I couldn't answer your question about tar up above without looking it 
up.  Plain and simple.  I prefer to use the heavy duties like Legato, 
Tivoli, etc.  flag the files you want, set the destination, and go get 
coffee.

Sure, every admin will say "but in that one instance where I'm 
recovering at 3AM and nothing else is working because of condition 
"X"..."     Fine.  that's what the man command is for.

Frankly, after this many years doing this, I would be skeptical of 
someone with that particular knowledge on tap.  It means they're much 
more into menial day-to-days than mission critical tasks requiring 
maximized tasks with maximized security.

your question would have me instead suggesting that it's far too easy 
to set up a quick commands-script to rsync -e ssh blah blah blah than 
to tar it up...then move it....then recover....then move it...then 
untar it.

Sure, we all recognize that the important tools are LVM (slicing up 
disks for use), installation of OSes (AIX, Solaris, linux among the 
most important), capacity planning, and documentation.  But other than 
commodity navigation and scripting, I waste time if I'm trying to 
remember all the command line switches of tar.


Now, to not sound totally like a whiner:  ABSOLUTELY do not exaggerate 
in an interview.  Not much better than lying there, and you're likely 
to get caught.  And I run 4 websites out of my home, all on Linux (FC1, 
FC2, ipcop) and I'm writing to you on OSX and my laptop is dual-boot 
FC3 with a Windows XP Pro side.

I guess my whole thing is people who look for "personalized" criteria.  
When I look for an admin, I go straight to the SAGE job descriptions 
page, and hire according to what I'm looking for in skill level from 
there.

(the URL is http://www.sage.org/pubs/8_jobs/core.mm)

Thanks for letting me rant.  I appreciate it.  I learned some stuff 
from your post, and hope I can shed some light for growth to you.  Or, 
just ignore me.  It's late, and I'm cranky.  LOL!

Jerald Sheets
Sr. UNIX Systems Administrator
Datatrac, Inc.
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