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I've never met an openbsd/freebsd, solaris or old school unix sysadmin that didn't have a total mastery of C/++ and scripting like perl. By total mastery I mean
by dobbsbob 13y ago
I've never met an openbsd/freebsd, solaris or old school unix sysadmin that didn't have a total mastery of C/++ and scripting like perl. By total mastery I mean debugging and even reverse engineering binaries looking for something that was eating memory, and often completely rewriting some major program parts to add security like old smtp and sendmail. The Sr admin I worked for could quote K&R by memory and was a much better dev than the software engineers there just he was a total neckbeard and didn't want to deal with "politics" so confined himself to the sysadmin dungeon. He made more money than them too
Just look at openbsd-dev mailing list. Most of those guys are sysadmins, like the guy who wrote OpenBGP from scratch, the pf maintainers... basically all Berkley forks were created by sysadmins.
- 4ad 13y agoDo you see many OpenBSD or "old school" sysadmins? I mostly see kids that haven't touched anything but Debian and Ubuntu, think RHEL is too old school and never heard of fork(2).' Good sysadmins obviously exist, but in my experience they are a shrinking minority.
- dobbsbob 13y agoI think sysadmins period are shrinking. Most companies are just signing up to cloud products and using feudal security. The only jobs I've seen locally here advertising for sysadmins required that you had fluency in C/python. Everything else is just a $14/hr desktop tech support position.
- popee 13y agoExactly. Mastering a language is function of time, but trying new language is not a bad thing. I'd even say that sticking with one language/paradigm is bad thing, because it's possible to master more then one language and you could get new perspective by learning new stuff (and finally maybe finding something useful from all those hipsters stuff).