What's really funny, is when you go into a new environment and fix some basic AD design problems, name resolution, roles, replication, and all of the sudden shit just starts working all over the place.
Hate to break it to you kiddo but if your schools are similar to ours, your admins are underpaid, overworked, understaffed and don't have a test environment so every little "whoops" goes live.
If you want to be a developer, start coding. CS is more algorithms and such...why you do it, as opposed to just doing it. Which is a good thing, don't get me wrong, but nothing beats doing it on your own. No sex jokes on that, guys.
Sysadmins and developers are...not usually comfortable together. Let's just say we're seated at different tables at the wedding, but we're required to be there.
Usually it's attempting to get into facebook or youtube or something. Had a teacher leave his system logged in and he started triggering alerts on the filter for hitting gay porn sites. Turned out a kid was going into his office and trying to browse it.
Most kids are too self-centered to think of "sticking it to the man". They're too busy trying to access websites they're not supposed to get into...had a few boot from CD or USB stick to a Linux machine to show their l337 skillz
My first real job... yeah... they used 1.0.0.0/8 as the mask, left every switch default configuration, and daisy chained them together, bridging sites with fiber
See this is what I meant about the young ones having all the answers, none of the experience...school networks aren't based on things resembling reality.
In many schools they just do what works. Then you don't touch it for fear of everything going kaplooey, and usually you're off fighting the next fire because you're supporting a few hundred people with a support team of two.
Because of A) manpower B) budget C) user demands we end up chasing tails a lot, and we have plenty of wanna-be admin students who smugly offer comments not having any freakin' clue what it's like to deal with the tech+users+politics
But you can't be overly educational with students when you're dealing with student issues (i.e., health/privacy laws, HR) and passwords. You can't get decent experience without sysadmin rights to a lot of stuff.
They end up with a lot of the grunt work. Install windows, configure this, replace the hard disk.
But it's always hilarious to find the ones that "have their own networks" at home, run Linux, think they know everything there is to know and can school us on how to "do it right"...then they find they have no freakin' clue how things work.
Hint: managing your own little home network is not like managing multiple buildings with hundreds of users and services and your whims aren't what you're supporting, you're supporting user whim...and some of those users sign your paycheck.
And in many cases, the "right thing" doesn't jive with what the user wants, and the user outranks you on the org chart.
Another hint: sysadmins are seen by their users as a necessary evil. You rank somewhere on the totem pole near the guy that mops puke up from the kindergarten room.
Some little jerk thinks he's proving something by intentionally breaking a system or finding a neat trick on the network. Bleh. You're proving you have time on your hands. The sysadmins are usually out trying to solve every "FIX IT NOW" problem that springs up and then take some extra abuse for it. Schools aren't run with testbed networks, they don't have users that are tech-centered or savvy, and they're never given the resources to "do it right". We macguyver it into working.
@fahadsadah I insist they run as standard user, because then they can't write some shitty program that relies on admin privs they have but "normal" users don't
They need higher privs (sometimes) for kernel debuggers and the like, but they often fail to test as restricted users. Then wonder why it generates support calls.
They used to to the system administration before I was hired, and it shows. I've lost count of the amount of crap I have put right because they simply didn't have enough time to understand what they were doing and the impact of it
So it's not like you go to school and come out ready to take on the world in sysadmin work. I have a CS degree and really it did nothing to prep you for working in a real world environment.
But if you can find someone working for the school that has in-depth knowledge of virtualization, large scale server deployment, desktop support, web server configuration, mail server deployment, proxy configuration, etc. etc. in one person...I'd love to see what you're paying.
No, we're not. There's no time for writing software.
Don't worry, @fah. You'll be broken as reality sets in. It happens to all of us.
You'll learn that a sysadmin's secret power comes from a bottle with a flame arrestor on top.
There are people utterly fascinated with the specs on new processors and cable placement. I think they're the same ones with glowing lights in the cases. In the job, we just need to keep stuff running, and that's really all the users count on.
There are people who memorize what type of memory goes with what motherboard for optimal performance. It didn't take long for me to just say, "try this. See if it beeps when you power it up."
@BartSilverstrim that's too true, I used to worry about that until I realized that either that system is going to be replaced before I figure it out or it will be around so long that it won't matter
There are plenty of mistakes and things that I would consider mistakes made in how things are done. But you deal with it. There are more important things to worry about.
Oh, yeah. The cloud. You know what else comes from clouds? Tornadoes.
@Ben: isn't that how StackOverflow's overlords designed the site?
I remember Jeff's podcasts basically saying he learned about sysadmin work on the fly by scaling up SO and adding to the sites because he didn't want to not know how it worked and/or lose control of how it worked. Something like that.
Guess it's good it's not on the Amazon @#$^%! cloud.
Ben, what makes you think you wouldn't have control over it? ( I used to think that too) most of the cloud solutions (I am most familiar with the azure stuff) gives control to the admins
You don't have physical access to it or "know" where it resides. The physical part of it.
Hence...cloud.
You can't just replace a hard disk or know how much is backed up at their site...you get blamed for things you can't reach out and strangle. like WHERE THE HELL IS THE AMAZON CLOUD SERVICES NOW!@?
you can know where it resides (again I know that azure can), what would you need physical access to? Most of the solutions (amazon, azure in particular) use VMs
Maybe I've just not had enough exposure to it, but the services I've been asked to look at were far too rigid and we'd have to change business processes to fit with that particular cloud service's model
Some people don't like the idea of relying on someone else to have access physically to hard disks and such. I know who can get our email server, I know if someone is trying to access the data, while you don't know who could be doing stuff with your data if it's not in your company.
Don't get me wrong, we've got a few cloud services and they're usually fine. It is annoying however when they have a blip that I am effectively powerless to fix it but still get shit for it not working.
Every time I hear about a solution that solves our problems, I cringe.
@BenPilbrow exactly
AD was supposed to clear up management issues. It cleared some, created others. Virtualization was supposed to be a huge savings. Worked for some things, created problems on other fronts. Now the cloud. /hums "stormy weather"
Prime example: We have cloud based email archiving. For about 23 days in March you could not see any email after ~2nd March. That is totally uncool that I got so much grief for that.
I would submit (now playing the role of cloud advocate :) ) that you can know who can access your data (private clouds) securitywise the cloud solutions (depending on provider) usually have literally millions invested in IPS/IDS firewalls etc
damn, I need more stars. @Zypher can we treat this like our national debt ceiling and just raise the limit when we get close to reaching it? I can't stand not having stars to hand out....
Also, I'd have got my ass sacked if one of our services was down for 23 days. But no, since we pay £££££ for this, they get a dressing down, a few freebies for us and it's business as usual. Until they bugger it up again. That winds me up even more
So Ben that sounds like an SLA problem that you got blamed for and couldn't pass on the pain. to me I'd be saying either bring that back in house (depeding on provider can be a pain) or change providers (which I know is easier said than done)
In the end, @JimB, you're relying on outsourcing services to someone else who isn't you or your company. For some things that's great. For others, it means you're taking a risk that they're going to provide equal or better work than you and/or your team can provide and take responsibility for.
There's still going to be potential friction because when certain things blow up, you take the heat, but you can't walk down to the NOC and get working on a solution.
You're basically getting some pay to take responsibility to sit on the phone and bitch to the people who are supposed to be getting access working again.
