[ale] Time for this Grey Beard to stir up some stuff

[Jerald Sheets]

I’m actually going to take the whole “Grey Beard” road, but more the trail beside the road than the road itself.  Same ethos, different topic.



When did Systems folk stop needing to be well informed on base operations of the OS?

Someone was hired for a $job earlier in my career that I was to work alongside.  12 years in the biz, Sr. for awhile, lots of stuff padding his resume, but good stuff that would be hard to fake.  LPI certs and RH certs (all of them) at the engineering level, etc.  Great prior roles.  Familiar with Nan Liu’s book, perl capable, Python afficianado.  Seemingly the all-around good SysAd.  

One day, $thing was happening that I immediately recognized as a glitch in the boot process. Some handoff between login and PAM.  I told him to check the PAM config and maybe look into perms around login.


DEER
IN
HEADLIGHTS


He didn’t understand the login process, how init spawned things, what the daemon was waiting for and what it sourced as it functioned.  We spent a following 2 hours on the whiteboard going over how all that worked.  We went from boot to login to PAM to init and run levels, and finally presentation items.  Through the course of the conversation he solved the issue himself simply because he became more informed in the whole process of “how things worked”™.

Now, I’m a DevOps guy.  Specifically automation and SRE and at scale.  Like massive scale: approaching 1M systems, on-prem and multiple cloud.  We got boxes. We abstract the crap out of everything and throw commands at hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of machines at a time.  Thing is, I’ve walked through nearly 30 years of “other” prior, and when you had to do a lot of hardware-aware work. It makes it much easier to not only understand what you’re doing, but also the implications of what you’re doing, and the assumptions that play into machine theory, and how machines are addressed and function both alone and in large groups.

I recall not that long ago having to be able to describe the boot process to more than one interviewer.  How networking rolls. How the network stack functions, etc.


What exactly is happening to the discipline, and how can we “do better” as a discipline?




—jms




> On May 27, 2021, at 7:16 AM, Neal Rhodes via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
> 
> I can certainly see starting off in an admin class without Vi.