| location: |
| Portland, Oregon |
| site: |
| Reed College |
| servers: |
| ~30 |
| workstations: |
| ~20 |
| sysadmins on staff: |
| 1 full-time (me) bits and pieces of several others |
| site overview: |
|
Reed is a small liberal arts college (user breakdown: ~1300 students,
~130 faculty, ~300 staff). My job is to manage the
“academic” *nix infrastructure (services for students and
faculty). These services include email, authentication (krb5),
authorization (NIS and LDAP), file (NFS, Netatalk, Samba). Reed is
predominately a Mac campus, the lack of collective MS buy-in makes being
a *nix-focused sysadmin here fun.
|
| job title: |
| Unix System Administrator |
| time at this job: |
| 6 years this month |
| | |
| years as a sysadmin: |
| ~8 years |
| first computer: |
| an Apple IIe (purchased by my Dad) |
| first OS: |
| some sort of DOS I suppose |
| favorite OS: |
| Debian GNU/Linux |
| first computer with root/administrator access: |
|
I went to art school in the early 90's and got a BFA in photography. I
got a PowerMac7100 to do digital imaging. Not too long after I
graduated I realized I didn't want to be a professional photographer and
started doing tech-support for my ISP (“The Internet
Channel” in NYC). My first experience with 'root' was when I
installed MkLinux on that 7100.
|
| first programming language: |
| BASIC |
| favorite programming language: |
| perl (I'll start working on Python and
Ruby any day now...)
|
| most often used programming language: |
| perl |
| first sysadmin job, computer and os: |
|
In 1996 I got a job as a 'Network Engineer' at a fast growing startup.
The job primarily involved staging, deploying, and remotely managing
firewalls for customers all over the US. The platform was
SPARC/Solaris. My position was commensurate with my experience,
consequently I worked 8am-6pm 4 days a week and 11pm-7am on the fifth
day. I learned a lot about unix and TCP/IP very quickly (I didn't have
a choice in the matter).
|
| ideal sysadmin job: |
|
My job right now is close to ideal (for me). I get to be involved in a large variety of projects and technologies. It's never boring and I'm always learning.
|
| favorite sysadmin tool: |
| '|' |
| most interesting sysadmin tool: |
| Up until this year I'd say it's a toss-up between [strace|truss],
and [tcpdump|snoop] I've learned a lot from those tools. Lately though, I've been having a lot of fun with cfengine. I'd held off using cfengine because of the number of machines I manage is relatively small and I wasn't sure how much effort would be involved before I started to see some benefits. Now that I've put in the effort I'm really excited about host config management tools.
|
| sysadmin tool I couldn't work without: |
| See answers to the two previous
questions. |
| education: |
|
dropped out of Hampshire College in '89, got a BFA in
photography from the School of Visual Arts in NYC.
|
| when I was growing up, I wanted to be: |
| I never *did* have an answer for
that question.
|
| If I wasn't a sysadmin, I'd be: |
| a baker, I love to bake bread (I just
don't seem to have enough time!)
|
| when friends and family ask me to
“fix” the computer or
“fix the internet”, I say: |
| “What's the problem?” |
| when I first meet someone,
and they ask what I do, I say: |
|
“I'm a system administrator.”
If that is met with a blank look I add, “I take care of
a bunch of servers.”
Sometimes I just say, “I'm a data janitor.” (voice
on the intercom says “disk failure in aisle 7!”)
|
| system administration is ...: |
| Making individual computers work and
making groups of computers work together as a system. |
| | |
| favorite food/cuisine: |
| Vietnamese |
| pizza topping: |
| anchovies! |
| crisis music: |
| I'm usually pretty focused during a crisis;
if music is playing I probably don't notice it.
|
| hobby/other job: |
| hobby = bicycling, other job = co-parenting my two kids |
| | |
| my office is: |
|
above ground! hallelujah! (my previous office was in a sub-basement)
|
| learned the most from: |
| working closely with more experienced coworkers
“shoulder surfing” |
| wish list: |
|
Being a generalist, sometimes I feel I'm spread a little
thin. I wish I had more time...
|
| daily web sites: |
| slashdot, nytimes, digg, osnews
|
| backups to tape or disk? |
|
Both! disk is great for ready access and automatic data retention
management, tape is removeable. Fortunately I'm not saddled with really
long (multi-year) data retention policies.
|
| editor: |
| vim |
| mail user agent: |
| mutt |
| web browser: |
| firefox |
| gui or cli: |
| I suppose it depends on the task at hand |
| computers at home: |
| 4 |
| (primary) home computer and OS: |
| A home assembled P4 currently running
Fedora Core 4. |
| oldest hardware in your garage or basement: |
| a SparcStation20 |
delicious
digg
technorati