On Sat, Nov 17, 2007 at 03:05:00PM -0800, Jordan Brown wrote: > At the risk of digging myself a deeper hole... > > I know that system administrators are hardworking and smart people who > keep their companies going. I've been one and I have nothing but > respect for them. What I am saying is that it is a flaw in today's > computers that businesses *need* dedicated highly technical staff to > maintain their computers, and that as the industry realizes that and > addresses it, reducing the need for highly technical administrators, > businesses will take note of the cost reductions that are possible. The > trend will be towards fewer and less technical system administrators, > and the winners in the industry will be those companies that can deliver > products that require less and less administration.
Folks certainly try to have very high user and system to sysadmin ratios. SMF and FMA are crucial to improving those ratios. We also build tools like DTrace that don't just run by themselves, and though they can be built into larger, easy to use tools (e.g., Brendan Gregg's DTrace Toolkit), they're often best used with some expertise -- but they help so much that you couldn't seriously argue that their non-triviality hurts. We see requests for a way to enable/disable services at next boot without impacting their current state. The start/stop aliases are the other side of the same coin. How could these features make it system administration more expensive?
