9 ms·

This seems to be geared towards the type of systems administrator that you're not really looking to hire, if you're the kind of startup that hangs out on hacker

This seems to be geared towards the type of systems administrator that you're not really looking to hire, if you're the kind of startup that hangs out on hacker news. Frankly, the Solaris & NIS+ questions are useless. You will not use either in a modern web startup, unless you're doing something wrong. Ditto for the AIX questions, LPARS, HP-UX, and Power-VM sections. Ask a sysadmin questions relevant to your environment, or where you want your environment to go. Don't expect them to be a domain expert in every single region, and don't give weight to domain expertise irrelevant to your startup. I coached a friend through a phone interview with a generic LAMP-based startup recently whose hiring consultant spent an hour asking him questions about BGP, OSPF, Solaris, VMWare and EMC specific SAN devices. The interviewer was a typical big company/academic systems administrator who had no startup experience. It was pretty ridiculous, these questions were asked by the interviewer because that's what his expertise was in, not because any of these were ever going to have any relevancy for this startup. He passed, of course, and now their whole environment are AMIs. I will say that I think any systems administrator today who isn't excited about learning Puppet or Chef is the wrong choice for a web startup.

brianb0 17y ago
I made this site quite a while ago when I was unemployed and the jobs available were few and far between and the questions being asked in technical interviews were lame questions that the interviewer was reading off of a script. I am the kind of person that will always look for the better way of doing something and I found many solutions for things that are not on this site.Solaris is much more stable and mature than Linux. I have had far less problems configuring RAC and other applications on Solaris that I have on any flavor of Linux. My favorite Linux dristro is Ubuntu which I wrote very little about on my site because nobody in the industry uses it. They all uses Centos, FC, and RH. And if you think that virtualization is not what a startup would be interested in then you are wrong. I have done an assignment lately where I worked with DS3400s, Brocate FC Swithes, Nortel BNT 7 Layer switches, Bladecenter HS22 with 7 x 7870 AC1 Blades. I setup ESXi 4 and Vsphere. I created a RAID 6 Array for the VMFS Store and several RAID 5s and O+1s for the databases. I created 2 Win2K8 RC2 Blades a MS 2K8 SQL Cluster between the two. They both shared the same LUN as per prerequisite by Microsoft.
bestes 17y ago
This is the first I have heard of either Chef or Puppet. They both look interesting, but I can't tell how mature they are. Anyone care to expand?
- dnsworks 17y ago
  Puppet and Chef are both Ruby based configuration management systems. One might say that CFEngine begat Puppet which begat Chef. Puppet was written by Luke Kanies after years of frustration as a systems administrator working with CFEngine. It's roughly three years old. It's mailing list has over 2,000 subscribers, and when I attended the recent PuppetCamp there were roughly 200 active participants in attendance. My very anecdotal estimate is that there are at least 30,000+ nodes using Puppet (My old consulting company was responsible for 6,500 nodes). Puppet is now maintained by Luke's startup, http://reductivelabs.com/ http://reductivelabs.com/ which took a $2m Series A round from True Ventures this summer. Puppet is written in Ruby/Rails, and implements it's own DSL for describing the configuration of your systems and applications. Chef was written by Adam Jacobs of HJK Solutions, now http://opscode.com/ http://opscode.com/. Adam was a vocal Puppet consultant, and wrote Chef in response to dissatisfaction around the handling of Puppet Bug #1010 (http://projects.reductivelabs.com/issues/1010 http://projects.reductivelabs.com/issues/1010), related to problems with idempotency initiated from Puppet's directed graph. Chef is maintained by Opsocde, whose CEO is Jesse Robbins from Oreilly and whose CTO is Adam Jacobs, they received a Series A round of $2.5m from Draper Fisher this summer. Both are open-source, and sit somewhat in the same genre as CFengine, ISconfv4 (mostly abandonware), and BCFG2.

brianb0 17y ago

I made this site quite a while ago when I was unemployed and the jobs available were few and far between and the questions being asked in technical interviews were lame questions that the interviewer was reading off of a script. I am the kind of person that will always look for the better way of doing something and I found many solutions for things that are not on this site.Solaris is much more stable and mature than Linux. I have had far less problems configuring RAC and other applications on Solaris that I have on any flavor of Linux. My favorite Linux dristro is Ubuntu which I wrote very little about on my site because nobody in the industry uses it. They all uses Centos, FC, and RH. And if you think that virtualization is not what a startup would be interested in then you are wrong. I have done an assignment lately where I worked with DS3400s, Brocate FC Swithes, Nortel BNT 7 Layer switches, Bladecenter HS22 with 7 x 7870 AC1 Blades. I setup ESXi 4 and Vsphere. I created a RAID 6 Array for the VMFS Store and several RAID 5s and O+1s for the databases. I created 2 Win2K8 RC2 Blades a MS 2K8 SQL Cluster between the two. They both shared the same LUN as per prerequisite by Microsoft.

bestes 17y ago

This is the first I have heard of either Chef or Puppet. They both look interesting, but I can't tell how mature they are. Anyone care to expand?

dnsworks 17y ago
Puppet and Chef are both Ruby based configuration management systems. One might say that CFEngine begat Puppet which begat Chef. Puppet was written by Luke Kanies after years of frustration as a systems administrator working with CFEngine. It's roughly three years old. It's mailing list has over 2,000 subscribers, and when I attended the recent PuppetCamp there were roughly 200 active participants in attendance. My very anecdotal estimate is that there are at least 30,000+ nodes using Puppet (My old consulting company was responsible for 6,500 nodes). Puppet is now maintained by Luke's startup, http://reductivelabs.com/ http://reductivelabs.com/ which took a $2m Series A round from True Ventures this summer. Puppet is written in Ruby/Rails, and implements it's own DSL for describing the configuration of your systems and applications. Chef was written by Adam Jacobs of HJK Solutions, now http://opscode.com/ http://opscode.com/. Adam was a vocal Puppet consultant, and wrote Chef in response to dissatisfaction around the handling of Puppet Bug #1010 (http://projects.reductivelabs.com/issues/1010 http://projects.reductivelabs.com/issues/1010), related to problems with idempotency initiated from Puppet's directed graph. Chef is maintained by Opsocde, whose CEO is Jesse Robbins from Oreilly and whose CTO is Adam Jacobs, they received a Series A round of $2.5m from Draper Fisher this summer. Both are open-source, and sit somewhat in the same genre as CFengine, ISconfv4 (mostly abandonware), and BCFG2.