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."
Re:Especially if they are training developers (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: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:Especially if they are training developers (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:single point of failure? (Score:3, Informative)
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 students receive a great value and enthusiastic service from their colleagues. The risk of system failure is pretty low since we have decent turnover and a hierarchy of newbie and more experienced staff. (It also helps having a good balance of student employees in the technical disciplines and the business administration major.) Everybody starts out with very little experience, and gets direct access to systems they wouldn't otherwise be trusted with. We put heavy emphasis on documentation and formal training requirements, but a lot of stuff is "throwing us in the lake and learning how to swim." I was 18 when I got the security team lead position, and later that week a horrible false positive in $vendor's antivirus definitions rendered every workstation in the college useless. The real-world experience of emergency response and dealing with managing a team and staying accountable to others taught me so much.
I value this kind of opportunity as something much more valuable than an internship, some entry-level jobs, or even my degree program. The job's flexibility with my school schedule and direct pertinence to my studies added several dollars worth of value to the decent student hourly rate.
Re:single point of failure? (Score:2, Informative)
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 department has only one purpose; to make things easy on the users.