7 ms·

> For every competent FreeBSD or Illumos sysadmin there are 10x equally experienced with Linux That's the Nth I've read this quote on HN, it became a classic..

by atmosx 9y ago

> For every competent FreeBSD or Illumos sysadmin there are 10x equally experienced with Linux That's the Nth I've read this quote on HN, it became a classic... You can't find a FreeBSD sysadmin but you can find a Linux admin. Where I work I have to deal with AIX, Solaris, Open/FreeBSD (Had Net before), Linux (all major flavours) and (god Forbid) Windows Server (2008, 12R2, 2016 and Nano). I've build packages for most of these systems. I don't know all of them inside/out but NEVER had problem implementing/setting/testing features in any of them. Can you tell me in a what way an intermediate (say 5 years) of experience, linux sysadmin would have problems managing a Free/Open/NetBSD?

tedunangst 9y ago
Guess it depends on the flavor of admin. With some regularity a linux admin "with decades of experience" will show up and announce that openbsd is terribly broken and nothing works, not even the most basic pkg-add command. Uh, did you mean pkg_add? See! Openbsd is so broken they called the command pkg_add while I typed pkg-add. I've never had this trouble with linux! I'd be worried about letting such a person admin linux servers, but I guess you can limp by as long as you keep your infra to what they already know. Ideally you'd weed such people out before hiring, but maybe if you need to hire an admin you don't know enough to do that?
- atmosx 9y ago
  Totally agree. BTW, thanks for signify it is an awesome system for pkg signatures. It took me a while to get it working correctly for automatic pkg signing but once it all clicked together, the system was simple as any I've see! ps. The best documentation I've found, was the manpage[1]. [1] https://man.openbsd.org/signify https://man.openbsd.org/signify
Spivak 9y ago
It's hard enough to find Linux admins, even in major cities. There are people who will put Linux experience on their resumes, but almost nobody who can boast more than casual home use. We ended up giving up on finding a Linux admin after a few months of the job posting collecting dust and decided to just hire someone fresh out of college a train them from scratch. Then you run into the problem that BSD admins are even rarer, and AIX/Solaris even rarer than that. Someone with experience with Linux could likely find their way around any UNIX like system but given the choice we would rather deal with some awkwardness in a familiar environment where admins have far more experience and we can leverage our exiting infrastructure, scripts, and config management.

by atmosx 9y ago

tedunangst 9y ago

Guess it depends on the flavor of admin. With some regularity a linux admin "with decades of experience" will show up and announce that openbsd is terribly broken and nothing works, not even the most basic pkg-add command. Uh, did you mean pkg_add? See! Openbsd is so broken they called the command pkg_add while I typed pkg-add. I've never had this trouble with linux! I'd be worried about letting such a person admin linux servers, but I guess you can limp by as long as you keep your infra to what they already know. Ideally you'd weed such people out before hiring, but maybe if you need to hire an admin you don't know enough to do that?

atmosx 9y ago
Totally agree. BTW, thanks for signify it is an awesome system for pkg signatures. It took me a while to get it working correctly for automatic pkg signing but once it all clicked together, the system was simple as any I've see! ps. The best documentation I've found, was the manpage[1]. [1] https://man.openbsd.org/signify https://man.openbsd.org/signify

Spivak 9y ago

It's hard enough to find Linux admins, even in major cities. There are people who will put Linux experience on their resumes, but almost nobody who can boast more than casual home use. We ended up giving up on finding a Linux admin after a few months of the job posting collecting dust and decided to just hire someone fresh out of college a train them from scratch. Then you run into the problem that BSD admins are even rarer, and AIX/Solaris even rarer than that. Someone with experience with Linux could likely find their way around any UNIX like system but given the choice we would rather deal with some awkwardness in a familiar environment where admins have far more experience and we can leverage our exiting infrastructure, scripts, and config management.