Friend is interested to learn Linux Sys admin, will it help for his Career 4669

On 5 Sep 2005 16:33:40 -0700, Noah Roberts staggered into the Black Sun and said:

Er. Noah, I wouldn't say that you "don't know poo". Everybody's got gaps in their knowledge. The trick is to minimize those gaps and be able to fill in and improvise when necessary. There are at least 2 people who are as good as I am in my local LUG, and one former LUG member who's better than I could ever be.

AOL, mostly. The "building a kernel from scratch" bit is specific to Linux-*BSD, since commercial Unices have kernels supplied by the manufacturer, and there's not quite as much that the admins get to play with there.

AOL!

One caveat: In larger companies, sysadmins do not write documentation. Technical writers write documentation; sysadmins keep the boxes running. The skillsets required for both jobs are different, though there is some overlap. Small companies don't always *have* tech writers. A good sysadmin will be something of a Jack Of All Trades, of course.

Tech writers are good at taking complicated concepts and distilling them down to numbered lists of Things To Do that any person can follow. Sysadmins often have to find patterns in chaos, then come up with ways to deal with those patterns. Good tech writing (like good sysadminning) is an art; an art which I have yet to master. I try, but these days it seems that I have to do more sysadmin-operations stuff than documentation writing.

(Also, the only proper response to a programmer who introduces an uncommented 300-line block of unsafe pointer idiocy with* This is really complicated *is a LART.)

s-Black magic-experience. See the old joke about "Replacing frammistat buttembly: $50. Knowing which frammistat buttembly to replace: $49,950." HTH,

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong ----------------------------- penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL