You know, I've been enjoying this discussion very much, despite the homeland threat level occasional veering towards fuschia.
I don't know about anyone else, but I've gotten a few key points out of all of the information presented: 1) *Vendors differ* in their approaches to creating systems and software. Windows comes from a desktop background where they had to deal with all levels of user experience, while UNIX comes from a very different background. Both sets of vendors, however, have come a long way since their beginnings. Windows had a lot of learning to do in the server realm, but long gone are the NT Server days. Powershell is a significant tool, and as has been mentioned, more and more of the Windows system internals are coming out into the open for people to use and understand. On the UNIX side, we've come a long way from cryptic libraries and do-it-yourself drivers. In fact, without Red Hat and Suse doing the work they've done on the support contract side, larger companies would never have taken linux seriously (and Sun might still be around :) ). UNIX is more user-friendly than ever, and they learned that by watching Windows. This brings up a second point: 2) *Employers differ* on what they want and need out of their technology. Some companies are willing to put their money behind strong technologists who have a lot of low-level knowledge of the systems and can debug those drivers, while others require accountability outside the company in the form of service contracts and SLAs. Even when paying for software and systems, though, someone earlier mentioned expecting them to be bug-free. I think that's a bit optimistic, and why we still need sysadmins to help manage those bugs, find temporary fixes, and report to the interested parties to work with them to a resolution. Some companies are willing to work with CentOS and Ubuntu while others insist on RHEL, AIX and Windows, and they don't need or want their employees spending time debugging and fixing, but rather want them engaged in relationship management to get things done. That brings up a third point: 3) *Sysadmins differ* on what they bring to the table and how they do their jobs. In fact, we as a group can't even seem to agree on what a system administrator is, so it should be no surprise that employers don't really know either, and there is therefore a wide array of expectations by our various employers about how we should be spending our time. Some of us come from strong technology backgrounds like computer science and software engineering, and we find jobs that require that level of skill because we enjoy it. Those employers expect us to be mucking with code to make things smoother or more efficient. Some of us come from more of a business background and prefer to manage the vendor relationships to get satisfaction, and our employers expect us to be on the phone with those vendors or with the (usually outsourced) help desk dealing with things like reporting and commercial management/deployment tools. Sysadmins even, believe it or not, differ on how they want to interact with each other. It may very well be that UNIX, because of its design and use cases, tends to foster more involvement with peers, while Windows, again because of its design and use cases, fosters more involvment with vendors and technical support institutions. There is still a need for admins of all types to talk with and learn from their peers, even when their peers may deal with "the other OS". Hopefully LOPSA can fill than need. 4) Finally, *communities differ* in their missions and how they support the various vendors, employers and technologies. Just because the Windows community doesn't support as much code-diving as the UNIX community doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There seem to be plenty of forums and blogs online for Windows users, and there are conferences, though they have different offerings from the more UNIX-centric conferences because, as already mentioned, UNIX and Windows are still different. There are also vendor communities, for tools that are cross-platform or for technologies (like storage) that apply all over. My employer, being a pharmaceutical, is part of a community of companies who face similar organizational and regulatory challenges, but since we don't see people from academia, it might be easy to imagine that there's less of a community there, which is far from the case. The approaches all differ, but in the end what we bring to the table is enabling companies (that is, employers) to meet and exceed their goals through the application of appropriate technology, keeping that technology performing at acceptable levels, improving on the existing technology when possible, and finding new technology as needed. Again, I think we all hope that we as an organization can bridge all of these differences and bring the whole of the sysadmin community together. -Adam _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
