As part of my class at OLFU, I recommended that people check the GNU info pages for some utilities, because sometimes they contain more information. I didn't have any hard data to back that theory, it was just from experience.

So, I wrote a small perl script that found all the executables in /bin, /usr/bin, /sbin and /usr/sbin, looked at their man page and info page, and compared the number of lines in each. I ignored any executable that didn't have both a man or info page, and I processed the output of both man and info to exclude blank lines and info's first line, which is a kind of header. (The first run of my script found that 90% of the programs had info pages one line longer than the man page, and I discovered it was just that header on the first line of info's output). I also eliminated any info page that is just the info program parsing the man page for the given program.

Here's the results, from my x86_64 Fedora 9 system with many of the development packages installed.

National Websites: Pre-College NSBE Alumni NSBE International NSBE National Convention Regional Sites: R1 R2 R3 R4 R5 R6
Donate to NSBE $

ID: 70634 Mr. Kenneth Smith Logout

View Resume
Smith, Mr. Kenneth

National Society of Black Engineers
View Original File: file588447.htm ID:70634
1130 North Franklin Street
Black Data Processing Associates Member
Pittsburgh, PA 15233 United States
Home: (412) 321-6163
Work: (412) 321-6163
Cell: (412) 592-2587

ksmit5a@acd.ccac.edu

Created: Sunday, August 31, 2008 at 5:30 PM EST Edit this Resume

I've been thinking recently about what the term "mentoring" means for professional sysadmins.

I've usually said that I'm "self-taught" in system administration. Most sysadmins I know say the same thing. I say this because I didn't take any classes on sysadmin, and in the technical aspects, at least, I was self-directed in my first few system administration jobs. My supervisors and coworkers may have given me hints or things to look at, but I didn't have the opportunity to watch them work directly.

But I'm not really "self-taught", certainly not in the way that a musician might be "self-taught" or a cook might be "self-taught". You can imagine someone teaching themselves to play the piano, for instance, by sitting down at the keyboard and pressing different keys in various ways and observing how the piano sounds, or someone trying cooking ingredients in different ways and tasting the results. But can you imagine someone sitting down at a Unix prompt and typing random keystrokes until they learned how to administer a machine?

On the subject of tools and hints;

I've been using tools like Faq-O-Matic on the job for years, to attempt to capture all those little things that you can never quite remember. Lately, again at work, I put together a large TWiki based FAQ for users and administrators. I used TWiki simply because it was the tool the local engineers were using and I was the one maintaining the server. ;)

Recently, I decided it was time to start gathering some of my many little, non-work specific notes onto a public wiki, using MediaWiki. If you are curious, come check out The System Adminstrator's Zone. It only a week or so old and is in a very raw state. I'm not sure I'm happy with the structure, but I am open to suggestions.