Managing Young Sys Admins At Oregon State Open Source Lab 141
mstansberry writes "Lance Albertson, architect and systems administrator at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, uses a sys admin staff of 18-21-year-old undergrads to manage servers for some high-profile, open-source projects (Linux Master Kernel, Linux Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, and Drupal to name a few). In this Q&A, Albertson talks about the challenges of using young sys admins and the lab's plans to move from Cfengine to Puppet for systems management."
Props to them (Score:1)
Especially if they are training developers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Right. Actually, real-world situations of system administration often aren't very good learning environments. If you're hosting real-world stuff, the best advice is often "Don't touch this, and don't mess around with that." Not messing around with things is often how you achieve stability.
Not to say that SAs don't mess around with things, but it's often not a really experimental situation when you're administering live servers. You're being careful and doing as little as possible. I suppose that, too,
Re: (Score:1)
"Never touch a running system" is what usually leads to the spectacular failures that make it into the press.
If you know and understand something, patching and upgrading it is no big deal - but it helps you to stay familiar with whatever you're dealing with. Also, planned outages and planned upgrades ensure that everyone is familiar with the system and documentation stays current.
Not touching your systems is a very, very bad practice.
Re:Especially if they are training developers (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
Thats what test labs are for.
Also, a good SA will know when "I wonder what happens if I do this...." is safe to try or not. There are no hard and fast rules.. sometimes an SA should be asking that question and considering applying it.
Normally, only when troubleshooting an issue so business-impacting that it can't wait for a maintenance window to fix.
Where "I wonder what happens if I do this..." is actually a knob the SA fully understands, and wonders if turning it off (or on) will help with the par
Re: (Score:2)
Also, a good SA will know when "I wonder what happens if I do this...." is safe to try or not.
Oh, sure, I agree. But I was saying that it's often not a great learning environment specifically in that you shouldn't just poke around and say, "I wonder what happens if I do this..." I mean, if I were introducing someone with little or no sysadmin experience into a team, one of the first rules I would set is, "At least for the time being, don't poke around in any production systems unless you and I both know what you're doing."
Thats what test labs are for.
Yeah, but is that what we're talking about? Students poking around on test
Re:Especially if they are training developers (Score:4, Insightful)
The ideal combination would be for them to administer live systems and test systems at the same time, e.g. have access to both.
And utilize change control.
Use test systems to experiment and learn. Make proposals to accomplish tasks/maintenance that need to be done to live systems (such as upgrades).
On lab systems, they test/experiment with their proposed administration procedures/configuration changes. Before using them in the maintenance of live systems, they document what they plan to do step by step, and two other admins, a "partner", and a senior admin go over the procedure with them, question them about any apparent gaps, lookup any missing information needed, and take a copy of the procedure.
Then at the planned time, the young admin will run the procedure exactly as documented.
If they need help, or something (bad) should happen to them in the middle (e.g. they tripped over something, broke a leg, or broke their keyboard in the middle of maintenance), such that they can't complete the maintenance task, or get stuck, the other two admins both agree to be available to help and pick up if necessary.
Re:Especially if they are training developers (Score:5, Insightful)
In an ideal world, all systems get regular attention and everything hums along smoothly. In a less ideal world, people are distracted from what is working by what isn't working, and their knowledge gradually atrophies, until they no longer dare touch what is working for fear of making it join what isn't working. This is a thoroughly pathological situation; but, if you are stuck in it, Just Not Touching and hoping for the best is quite possibly more logical than biting the bullet and taking one for the team.
Re: (Score:2)
but, if you are stuck in it, Just Not Touching and hoping for the best is quite possibly more logical than biting the bullet and taking one for the team.
Sounds like a typical Friday night for me.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Most Universities don't teach any system administration. I don't know about you, but I picked it up hands on, by creating Game! [wittyrpg.com].
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A course titled "Unix Administration" is a 4000 level course offered as part of the CSE program at UF. What it covers I don't know (and won't for a few years) but there is at least *one* admin course taught at *one* university for comp sci/engineering folks...
Looking forward to taking it too, since I teach a Linux Admin course here at the community college I work at...
Re: (Score:1)
System administration changes as quickly as the computing technology changes, which is way too fast for curriculums to catch up..
Many universities revise their curriculums once every 7 years or longer. For system administration, that's a disaster, it would be 2008 before they considered replacing the "Windows NT" class with a "Windows 2000 Server" class per the suggestions of some students (received a few years back).
Many universities use a lot of old outdated computing hardware, and don't have labs
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
Sysadmins have good growth opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
While entry-level programmers may make a slightly higher salary than a similar systems administrator, over time there's a lot more upward opportunity for the sysadmin. Systems Engineering and Systems Architecture - being the guy that ties the network, the server, and the apps together, is a very in-demand skill and is something programmers will never have the opportunity to become. Programmers only make the big bucks when they have other specialized knowledge that's specific to the apps they are developing, i.e. finance, GIS, physics, etc..
I'm personally glad I made the decision 12 years ago to move into systems after earning my Comp. Sci. degree. I went from web app development for an ISP to Linux/Solaris/HPUX sysadmin, to Systems Architecure, to Info Security.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I've got to assume that you aren't a sysadmin, from your tone. At least, if you /are/ a sysadmin, you haven't really thought too much about it.
Properly executed, systems administration is a far more difficult than the non-system admin (or even the casual sysadmin) realizes. Disaster and recovery planning, performance tuning, infrastructure design, these aren't small-brain tasks. There's a big difference between adding users and managing an infrastructure, and yet, sysadmins do both.
Don't knock the professio
Re: (Score:1)
I am a sysadmin, if you're willing to call someone who works with Windows that.
I like my job and i like what i do - but i have no illusions about it. Yes, there is lots of interesting stuff to do, but unless you work in a large corporation, people will still call you up if they can't fix a paper jam themselves.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I think a better analogy might be professional diver, airplane pilot, or astronaut
It's not a field where you can simply be educated on the subject, and become a practitioner that way, you need hands-on experience. A large amount of intense training is required to do it competently.
And is also a risky business... if you're the DBA, and the enterprise database server breaks (hardware failure)... who will the fingers be pointing at for blame?
What are people going to say to you, when you tell them...
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
It's always fun when we have interns from the local university CS dept and the first time they run into a systems problem in the real world, i.e. a router not properly configured or a firewall problem, and they spend hours trying to figure out what is wrong with their code.
I come from the SA/SI world. The students always wonder why so much of our code is written in Perl as opposed to PHP, Python, Ruby, or whatever is the "cool" scripting language this year. And the reason is that a lot of it was stuff that
Re: (Score:2)
Since good SA's like stability and good developers like chaos the two normally don't mix.
So THAT'S how Warhammer 40K got started...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
From a quick scan of the program catalog, no. Not even SA courses.
I know a few years ago they used to have what I expect would be an excellent SA course. I know the guy who taught it, and he was an excellent SA whose attitude towards the process was extremely infective. He had people setting up systems and mail servers and what not and tearing them down to see how they ran. The impression I got from him and others was that those who took the course loved it, but he and t
Re: (Score:1)
Two OSL staff have created and taught a system admin course at OSU: http://cs312.osuosl.org/ [osuosl.org] The content is available under Creative Commons.
We're actively working with the EECS faculty to incorporate both system administration and open source topics into the course offerings.
Re:Especially if they are training developers (Score:4, Informative)
Really? I've had the OPPOSITE experience. I've had to fix more crap done by developers who thought they could do sysadmin work than I have dealing with other SAs.
Re: (Score:2)
They really are two different skill sets.
People who are developers CAN learn to be SA's and vice versa. However, in my experience they don't want to. They are developers because that is what interests them. Same for the SA's.
Re: (Score:2)
No, they were excellent developers, just crappy SAs.
Re: (Score:1)
Were they excellent developers or excellent programmers? There's a difference, in my opinion.
An excellent developer has a work ethic that would mesh nicely with an excellent sysadmin. That isn't necessarily the case with a programmer. You can be a wiz kid programmer, but not actually /develop/, you just write. Development is a much more in-depth process. You do things like document, you shepherd the code into maturity, and you manage it throughout its lifecycle. Again, that's a developer, not necessarily a
Re:Especially if they are training developers (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the work ethic. It's temperment, the whole attitude towards things. As a developer, I'm very uncomfortable working on production systems, because there's a lot of walking-on-eggshells. If something goes wrong in the dev or QA environments, I can do a lot of "OK, try this... try this... try this", and if one of those things brings the environment down in flames, such is life. When I find the right combination it can be restored to the original broken state, then I can re-apply the thing I think worked, and if that works, I can then hand that off to ops to put on the production system with some confidence that it will work.
If a production environment has some problem which has to be corrected "live", though, that's a very BAD way to try to fix it, for obvious reasons. Instead, a lot more passive analysis has to be done before trying anything, and more important than "will this fix the problem" is "will this bring the system down (worse than it is) or worse, destroy customer data". And since when a developer is called in to help with production there's probably a major problem, the developer usually has to deal with the ops folks and management breathing down his neck as well.
Re:Especially if they are training developers (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they weren't excellent developers.
They may have been great code monkeys, but those are literally a dime a dozen if you don't mind importing from India.
A GOOD developer is also a GOOD sysadmin.
I've been doing both for ~15 years, in that time, I've met 2 good developers. The rest have are monkeys who write code, many of which who write well. Maybe in the next 15 to 30 years I'll meet a few more. With everything going networked now days, you have to be a good sysadmin to understand how to write software that admins can use.
You don't write an apache webserver type application without being an admin, you just don't know what you are trying to hit. This isn't unique to developers writing for admins, its true for all development. If you don't know how to do and have experience doing what the software is supposed to be used for then its practically impossible for you to write software that doesn't suck. This is why there isn't a point of sale system on the planet that isn't asstastic. You'll be hard pressed to find a developer now days who actually had a job when they bothered to pay attention enough to know what good POS software needs to do.
Interestingly enough, I've never met a CS student or recent grad who was even a good code monkey. After several bad experiences our company has developed a 'no CS grad' policy for developers. We'll take you after you have 5 years or more experience, but with less than that all you are is an arrogant asshole who thinks he deserves to get paid ridiculous amounts of money and you still spend a few years breaking them down into something useful. (Read: removing the arrogance of youth and learning that there is far more software AND administration than just writing code or installing Linux)
Re: (Score:1)
How about we replace "chaos" with an equivalent word, "unstable".
Developers are expecting the things they are working with to be malleable and assume they are suitable to be changed. They may easily leave a system in a state where it's easy to do something interesting later, with the understanding that if something goes wrong, it can and will be fixed.
Then, since their job isn't to be a professional SA, they run off and do other things and completely forget about it for a while, and things degenerate. If
That's what you do in a university... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Nope (Score:5, Interesting)
The members of the CS department at my college actually petitioned to have me take over as their lab admin. The incumbent staff admin was notorious for breaking things and making it a chore to use the systems. Despite the complaints against him and requests specifically to hire me on, the department chair kept the incumbent.
I found it all very amusing, especially since I'm not a CS student. I'm just well-known enough to the group. I'm also greatly amused by how often I get asked for help when I'm around there, specifically one case where a student was in a 390-something class. I replied, "We really don't know each other at all, and I'm not a CS student. What made you think I am a good person to ask?" He said he'd just seen me help with enough other people's problems... and so I gave him a hand too.
Long-windedness aside, my university only uses students to provide, "Cean the viruses off your personal computer," services.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The ignorance of your post is one good indication of why they didn't replace him with you.
If you have a bunch of CS students petitioning to make you the admin, thats another good indication that you shouldn't be doing it. Part of this I know because I'll bet a months pay that the job description for the position doesn't include 'CS students must think your a swell guy and a good admin', which you seem to think IS part of it.
An admins job isn't just 'make things easy on users'. There is a lot more that goe
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
And you wonder why people don't like your type...
Mod parent up! (Score:2)
Man, I wish I hadn't already burned all my mod points today. Been there, done that, got the scars and war stories along with my BOFH T-shirt. :)
It's not trolling if it's true ;-) (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, I haven't seen someone display such blatant ignorance while calling someone with a clue ignorant for quite some time, so I guess I'll set the record straight ...
That is an absurd thing to say, and the irony is that you claim to be a great sysadmin, but can't figure out that a good sysadmin doesn't have ignorant users (at least not for long.)
And how do you plan to accomplish that while leaving them ignorant? You'd be surprised how much happier users are when you actually know how to do your job and educate the users so that they understand why something has to be done the way it does.
Are you fscking serious? Why the hell do you think they came up with /etc/motd ? (Message Of The Day for those who don't know and are following along.) If you are doing your job right then users know when backups happen. They know what new software you are installing, and when; you have visibility.
Maybe he has people similar to you setting the bar ;-)
Non-disclaimer: I was a VAX/VMS system manager at the age of 22, having been professionally trained by DEC at their Burlington Training facility, and I have been involved in various aspects of technology from sysadmin, hardware and software development, SQA my entire adult life (I'm now "over the hill"). I have had to deal with idiots like the parent my whole life, and his/her/it's attitude is outdone only by phenomenal cluelessness.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
"...our company now has a policy of not hiring anyone out of college with less than 5 years work experience"
Wow, good luck with that. So where are CS graduates supposed to get this 5 years of work experience if everyone hires like your company?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As someone who has approximately 5 years of experience, including 6 years of part-time and contractual small business network/system admin work and several years in small-medium hospital sysadmin work, let me just say that his attitude seems to be very, very prevalent.
Granted, I may be getting lied to, but I've been told that I don't have any "big shop experience" even though I was one of three admins handling 250 Linux servers and several thousand workstations. This just happened to be a number larger than
Yes it is. (Score:3, Informative)
An admins job isn't just 'make things easy on users'.
Yes it is. It is an admin's job to make things as easy as possible on the users over as long a period as possible. That is why backups are made; so the users don't have to redo all their work if there's a failure. That's why there's firewalls; so the users' machines don't get infected and their network isn't crippled. Without an admin, small organizations can chug along until something breaks (and they have to contract an admin to patch it), but life isn't easy. A full-time sysadmin for a company or a depar
Re: (Score:2)
I can understand your point that he probably does not have nearly as much knowledge as the incumbent admin, but that doesn't mean he couldn't do a better job. It is a computer lab, not the central Network facilities for the college. The computer lab person is pretty much there first to make sure people don't destroy the computers or do anything illegal and second to make sure to help the people in the lab. The guy currently in the position sounds like he doesn't really want to help the "lusers" so he loc
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I don't intend to have a big back-and-forth on it, but I work professionally at a CPA firm. I'm entering my 5th year there. It is their policy that interns are near graduation, and staff have degrees. I was brought in at the end of my freshman year. In that time, I've become the resident expert on Unix related audits, designed and maintained several systems that deal with varying types of medical billing information for every hospital in my state, and I know most of the legal requirements of my state
Re: (Score:2)
Despite the complaints against him and requests specifically to hire me on, the department chair kept the incumbent.
Well then maybe the department chair will think twice next time before he stores those photos of himself quicksorting that trollup on the department fileserver.
Re: (Score:2)
Um... Don't all universities use students as free/cheap labor?
There fixed that for you.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
At my university, pretty much all the lab-dwelling geeks had root on everything they wanted... one way or another.
Re: (Score:2)
Um... Don't all universities use students as sysadmins?.
HA! No. The University around here only lets CS Graduates touch a server for about 2 weeks, after studying about it for a month. Everything is handled by its own CT&IS Faculty. As someone who has multiple friends at the university, I will speak for the students to say the system they have set up BLOWS. They will, on occaison, hire they're GRADUATES to do some contract work.
Now, the Polytechnic that I went to, had us set up our own private networks, and administrate that. It was about as close to the rea
Re: (Score:2)
No, no one gets hired when they say 'I found out that I could use httptunnel/sshtunnel to get WoW past their firewall so I could break the rules!'
Because, you know, people love to hear about how you break the ru
Re: (Score:1)
This makes sense because those networks include sensitive data, security networks, and building access authentication. It seems like a good way to cut costs, but it is a potential security risk.
Lesson 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
The main thing that people that age need to learn (both professionally and personally) is that Their Actions Have Consequences.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Because a clever 19-21-year-old is (generally) already plenty proud of what he knows how to do. So proud that he'll (random example) upgrade Apache from 1.3 to 2.0 as a treat for everybody as he leaves to go party at his friend's college for the weekend.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
You mean like reading and posting to slashdot in the middle of the workday?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll agree, sysadmin is as much about process and discipline as it is tech knowhow.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree, as well. 90% of my time spent when teaching my junior admin is teaching him how to think like a sysadmin instead of a hobbyist.
Re:Lesson 1 (Score:4, Interesting)
I think patience and learning when to say "no" are big ones too.
It's so tempting and easy to take shortcuts in system administration. "We don't need to waste time checking our backups" or, worse, "we don't need to backup" before doing major work is just the sort of time saving notion that can really haunt you if something goes wrong. Ugly when you need those backups and you discover the backup system you put into place in a similarly hasty fashion has some tiny little problem, maybe an incorrect flag on a command, and so the backups are no good. Can't spend all your time on paranoid checking either, of course. It's an art juggling these risks, deciding what is critical and what is not. There are never enough resources. If you have to make room in order to back up something, and it's going to take an hour or more to find things that can be deleted, clean out trash, compress directories that haven't been used recently, move files around, and so on, it's tempting to skip it, particularly if an impatient PHB is breathing down your neck, and other users are just waiting to pounce on that space the minute you free it up. Then there are the programmers who can't write anything that doesn't waste gobs of disk space and RAM. Someone notices when their code makes excessive use of the CPU, but a few megabytes of hard drive space flys under the radar. Some really think it isn't worth even a few minutes of their time to fix things like that, not when they're under the gun themselves to bang out more features as fast as possible.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Lesson 2 (Score:2)
Lesson 2 is that it doesn't matter what your actions are, if someone doesn't like you and they've got power over your position, you're fucked.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, yeah. I learned that one about 20 years later. Hopefully most college-age sysadmins-in-training have a while before this principle kicks them in the balls.
Amazing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Young people with their heads on straight. Definitely newsworthy.
I know the whole "you young'un, you can't manage a server to save your life!" feeling and all that, but really... is managing a server, even an important one, really that hard - when you have someone to go to when you have questions? A lot of lab administration seems to be finding problems before they become a real problem, which is time consuming.
You may as well have a story about dental work done by *gasp* dental students and, lo and behold, they are actually doing a good job! Shocking. To think that young people could actually learn something. :)
OTOH, it's interesting to read about the difficulties he brings up. They're pretty ... boring, IMO.
It generally takes around six months for a student to feel comfortable with our environment.
Like most jobs?
Another challenge is the short turnaround with students, as we usually only have them for two to three years before they graduate. This creates a constant issue to ensure our documentation and training is honed.
Two to three years, that's not too short, is it? And it's interesting that it's an "issue" to him to keep their documentation good/honed. I hope the graduates are learning that documentation is a BIG ISSUE in real jobs, for exactly that purpose: if something happens to you, the business can't just stop for 3 months while someone else tries to figure out what you did :)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Only in engineering programs. CS programs still retain a lot of their "math heritage," and there is very little push for the students to write good documentation; at best, documentation seems to be an afterthought.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
is managing a server, even an important one, really that hard - when you have someone to go to when you have questions?
Thats exactly the position I'm in, and its the easiest part of the job I hold. If you know HOW to do things, the only thing left as part of the job is knowing WHAT to do.
When an issue comes up, its just "Hey, this is whats going on. Whats the best course of action? We could..."
And then he'll respond with "Yes, that sounds good" or "No, do this instead"
And Bam, its a cakewalk.
Re: (Score:2)
And knowing how to do something isn't toooo difficult with manuals, Google, and other people to ask.
Knowing what to do appears to come with experience.
Re: (Score:2)
Its also practically impossible for someone with no experience, which is why you don't let 'young'ns' do it.
CS students are not SA students. You don't let a dentist perform open heart surgery, but of course most of them, unlike CS students, know better than to try it. I guess dentists are better educated or less arrogant than CS students.
You want to let them manage a pseudo lab for training
Was that a short article or what? (Score:2)
I actually broke down and RTFA. The interviewer must have been in the next stall over or on an elevator with the Oregon State employee. How many questions was that, like 4 or 5? Maybe one of the servers was getting ready to crash because one of the student admins was trying to install Windows...
Good (Score:2, Insightful)
Great that the university is giving these newbies a chance to get their feet wet before they venture into the real world. This type of opportunity is what i fine lacking while I was going to school and I had to search this type of opportunity out for myself.
One of the biggest problem I find when you first enter into the IT field as a student is that there is a lack of on the job hands on training. Students really need to be expose to hands on materials more to reinforce what they've learned in text books
18-21 (Score:4, Interesting)
I am in the upper bounds of that range. I do Sysadmin stuff in our corporation, though not as much as the Chief IT Manager. I do the cabling, I set up the racks, I make sure the UPS are tested regularily. All the grunt work a Sysadmin would do. I help with decisions on new network policies, and dealing with security and updates. Network Topology is something I wish I had a say in, but don't. I will on occaison, be called in to reboot a server, or replace a bad drive.
I had to learn the Help-Ticket system on the job, but really that was like a 5 minute breeze because most of it is common sense. (Ticket comes in, prioritize, assign, do)
I'm glad to see that younger people are getting into these positions, since I think they help push forward newer technologies and methodologies. It'll sound like I'm tooting my own horn here (and Maybe I am just a little :P) but we've got a dozen boxes in our server room plugged into the rack so that people from other branches across Canada can Remote in to access certain software. It's a nightmare to look at, and it takes up alot of space. The IT Manager isn't fully familiar with Virtualization, though thats something I was taught in school less than 2 years ago. I'm sure you can see where this is going.
All in all, the only thing holding back us young people from these positions is just experience. Almost any school you graduate from with a CS degree will teach you the fundamentals of system administration. However you can't exactly apply for that position with little to no experience (don't get me wrong, you CAN apply, but the guy who has 5+ years experience managing Windows Server 2003 is going to look a bit shinier).
It's good to have a Looong project like this to show you DO have experience. I went and switched from a CS Degree to simply an Object Oriented Programming because it was shorter and I enjoyed programming more, but now that I'm out here working I wish I had that education. (I know right, how did I land a Sysadmin/Technician job as an OOP grad? Funny story, ask me later). Anyways, If I could show my boss "Here's the webserver that I set up and maintained" I think he'd be more lenient with letting me handle things I know how to handle. It's frustrating when he mentions a problem and you know a solution but he won't admit its a good idea because you're fresh. That's more a problem with my boss though, and probably isn't a good representation of every manager out there.
Re: (Score:1)
Sorry, why is parent modded as Troll? There's nothing trollish at all in there.
single point of failure? (Score:2)
The Oregon State University Open Source Lab's data center hosts some of the Linux community's heaviest hitting projects including the Linux Master Kernel and the Linux Foundation. It is also the primary location for the Apache Software Foundation and Drupal, open source content management software. The lab, aka OSUOSL, also hosted the core infrastructure for Mozilla's Firefox project, and currently host's six of Google's servers.
Uh- why is one organization the primary/master site for so many high-profil
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
Hosting Open Source is also a core competency to Oregon State. They made a rather clever decision to focus on the open source niche a few years back, and it's helped them bring in industry support and helped the student learning process, as shown by the article.
Re:single point of failure? (Score:4, Interesting)
I work for the OSU OSL.
Actually, we're more than a mirror. While mirroring is a major part of the services we provide, we also provide hosting for many projects' core infrastructure - Apache, Linux Foundation, Drupal, kernel.org, etc. Google is a major supporter of the OSL because we provide a place for projects whose needs have outgrown the more "off-the-shelf" structured hosting provided by Google Code or Sourceforge and need a more customizable environment.
As to the single point of failure concern - I disagree for several reasons:
It would take something more than a "pissed off dean" to summarily shut the OSL down.
-Greg
Re: (Score:1)
I don't know if there's any relation but Linus Torvalds lives in the Portland area, about 60 miles north of the OSU campus.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:single point of failure? (Score:4, Interesting)
We're a rather bright spot on the university's record; we are the largest open-source datacenter in the hemisphere, and that causes a lot of donations to come in. Take it from Ed: http://osuosl.org/sites/osuosl.org/files/ed_ray.png [osuosl.org] Nobody will shut us down.
But age is only a number... (Score:2)
I thought that being a good sysadmin, or a good tennis player, or a good anything depended on the experience and natural talent the person has, not his or her age. There are kids out there that can probably develop much, much better than many with years and years of experience in the field; hell, most of the hackers back in the day were kids themselves!
I think that actually letting these folks do something of importance with their skills is more laudable, since most companies that hire undergrads or high sc
Open Source Lab? Big Deal! (Score:1)
It's not like it's the Accounting department or HR. I have my own open source lab in my home.
I think I've been on the internet too long... (Score:2)
18-21 year old undergrads
Pics?
Re:I think I've been on the internet too long... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Heh, they aren't admins (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, there is no such thing as an 18-21 year old sys admin.
There are plenty of kids pretending to be admins that are 18-21 years old, but just because someone gives you root, doesn't make you an admin anymore than installing mysql and creating a table makes you a DBA.
Having root on a Linux box doesn't make you an admin, regardless of how ignorant you are of that fact.
Re:Heh, they aren't admins (Score:5, Insightful)
I beg to differ. I've been a sysadmin for 15 years. The professionalism and quality of the work done by the students here at the OSL is quite often indistinguishable from many of the people I've worked with over the years. Many of the people working on our hosted projects can't tell whether they're working with our professional staff or student workers.
We teach them to be sysadmins. They may not be sysadmins when they come to us, but they sure as hell are professional sysadmins when they leave.
How do you find a young sys admin?? (Score:1)
Are there people out of college who want to be sys admins? We are tying to hire a sys admin, but we either get people who are overqualified -- they would not want to do the job for a long time -- or we get people who are under-qualified -- front desk support types you cannot design and manage a whole network.
On top of that, new grads don't usually have a lot of real world knowledge for sys admin work, though we would definitely relax this requirement for someone who is a problem solver and eager to do the j
Re: (Score:1)
You probably aren't paying enough. $60,000 + medical and I'll move anywhere in the country for what you want.
lukehasnoname AT gmail DOT com
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
99.99 of sysadmin'ing comes from experience, which young ones do not have, or are in the process of learning (90% of the time due to necessity, being the low person on the totem). the experienced ones know enough to know that experience isn't cheap.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
99.99 of sysadmin'ing comes from experience
Right ... which is why we here at the OSL give them the opportunity to gain that experience in a real-world production environment while providing the mentorship they need. It dovetails nicely with the theoretical knowledge they're getting in their CS classroom work.
Personal experience in all-student department (Score:2, Informative)
I'm in my fourth year working and studying at the Colorado State University College of Business. Student-facing systems are pretty much 100% run by students, who report to student managers, who report to the IT Director and a student committee representing students who pay the tech fees. It's worked remarkably well, and I've been in several roles throughout my tenure- Lab Technician, network engineer, sysadmin, security team lead, web developer.
In terms of the department's effectiveness, I would say that st
So that explains (Score:2)
Why the Drupal site is so dog ass slow at times.
We would outsource to India but... (Score:2)
... these undergrads work cheap! And we only have to zap them once with the tazer to get them to stop doing "rm -rf /".
What's the point of this article? That young sysadmins can now be exploited by their school instead of their first employer?
Oh, and what exactly are they training them so well for anyway? Their first job, they'll learn that there's never time nor budget allowed for doing things like setting up Puppet. They want to do that, they can cram it in during lunch and after-hours, and hope they do
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
Because Greek mythology is reserved for server names, and everything else is copyrighted.
Re: (Score:2)
The lack of a marketing and sales division, or indeed the need to have a "marketable" name at all. Plus a geeky need to overexplain with acronyms, backronyms, puns on other software (more | less anyone?) or other obscure references. And, but to a much lesser degree, no desire to fight other projects and particularly companies with lawyers over trademark disputes. Usually if it's a cool name it's already used, like for example Phoenix which became Firebird which eventually ended up as Firefox. If you don't c
Re: (Score:2)
Even gayer than that would be "Dick Semens", hey I've got a new name for an OSS program!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)