On Tue, 18 May 2010, Elizabeth Schwartz wrote: > You know, it's not *just* that your colleague is an "old time solaris admin". > > I'm an old fart solaris admin and we were checking stuff into source > control back in the dark ages. > RCS was invented in 1982 and SCCS in 1972.
Glad to hear it. I have just noticed over the last 15 years or so that the sysadmins who were the worst at communicating and who insisted on doing lots of things the hard way have universally been long time Solaris admins. It's like there is a mindset that systems administration has to be difficult. I know it's not universal to all Solaris admins, it's just that the folks who I have had the most trouble with have all been Solaris admins. I think there are some odd cultural things going on and I would be interested in hearing about any studies on the subject. > If I may, I suggest trying to persuade him starting from *his* point > of view. Try to understand why he set things up this way. > Is it just laziness, or does he feel that there is security and > stability in sticking with a known good configuration? He has been running a one man show for quite a while. Some of it may be laziness, a lot of it is "work expands to fill the time alloted". He also has a pattern of refusing to communicate, it makes it tough to figure out what his point of view is. > Not saying this is right of course, just your basic "how to win > friends and influence people" or "getting to yes" sort of thing, > trying to understand what the other guy's point of view is. > > In terms of converting management I would start on the security side, > with lists of vulnerabilities and security best practices. That stuff > is easy to find and getting your servers up to those standards will > require introducing some of the changes you want to see. Security is a big point that I am bringing up. The other one is improving the ease and speed of deploying new systems. I spent three days last week rebuilding some systems that I should have been able to do in less than two hours. The kickstarts had some erroneous configurations that I had to go in and fix by hand, plus they just didn't configure a number of other things at all. Obviously there is a longer term problem with maintainablility. -- Matt It's not what I know that counts. It's what I can remember in time to use. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
