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

Thu May 27 11:17:44 EDT 2021

Relying on automation and abstraction IS the problem.
People know how to create a configuration in Ansible or Salt to install a service and make changes to a system, but they have no clue what that is actually doing.  I don't trust it.  I drive the younger folks here crazy, because I don't want to just place a Salt state on a system and let it magically do the thing I need done.  I insist on having it run a script that steps through the steps.
The RHCE certification path is pretty much an Ansible certification, now.  With 7.x and prior, you had to know in-depth how basic services work.  Configure Apache, configure a database, know some basic SQL, configure a directory service, etc...  Now?  Nope.  You just have to know how to deploy it with Ansible.  SUSE seems to be going the same direction with SUSE Manager/Salt.
The same problem started a lot earlier in the Windows world.  You now have a couple of generations of Windows sysadmins who didn't start out on DOS.  Most of them don't understand the basic layout of a c: drive.  Where did you save the file?  "In the documents folder".  Where is that?  "In my profile".  Okay, where is your profile stored on the hard drive?  BLANK STARE.

Allen B.
--
Allen Beddingfield
Systems Engineer
Office of Information Technology
The University of Alabama
Office 205-348-2251
allen at ua.edu

________________________________________
From: Ale <ale-bounces at ale.org> on behalf of Jerald Sheets via Ale <ale at ale.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 27, 2021 7:52 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Cc: Jerald Sheets
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [ale] Time for this Grey Beard to stir up some stuff

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.

_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo