Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Systems Administration experience

We've been having a lot of arguments with our human resources types about what exactly constitutes a good systems administrator and how we identify one from a CV.

Everyone who is a systems administrator knows how to spot one from a mile away. How do we do that? It's definitely got nothing to do with whether they have a degree or any other piece of paper with their name on it. It's got a lot more to do with how their brain works.

After a lot of effort, we've got the HR people to see that it's quality of experience not quantity that's important; that someone straight out of school who's be hacking around with *nix for a while is better than someone with a three year degree and three years of MSIE type experience. We're stuck with one niggling concern, however.

For some reason (to do with job gradings) it is important that we quantify the amount of time would take someone to learn to be a systems administrator. This is where I need some help ...

Assume that you're straight out of high school and you've never touched a computer in your life (bar perhaps the BA like things of writing letters to your gran and sending the occasional e-mail) *Hi Siv*. How long before you're competent to get root on a multi-user machine -- take RUCUS as an example: 500 user FreeBSD box? How long before you're competent to get root on several multi-user machines running business-critical functions on a variety of operating systems for an institution with 8000+ users?

It took my mind a while to get around that. I don't really know the answer. I do know where I might be making a mistake though. All my answers have been based on the incredibly intelligent people I know who've picked things up more quickly than the average CS/IS type person might. It's typical of most sysadmin -- the nature of the job requires that you learn very fast. I thinking I'm doing the incumbent an injustice here ... I think the answer the HR people are looking for is how long will it take a normal person with computer tendencies to gain these skills?

If you have any ideas on what the answer might be please let me know :-)

posted by guy at: 12:51 SAST | path: /issues | permanent link

Monday, November 22, 2004

simple HTTP proxy

So there I was trying to get RSS feeds to work in centericq when I realised I had a problem. I need to use a proxy server to access feeds from outside of Rhodes, but the university's proxies forbid me from fetching pages that are on the local network. Centericq has no concept of proxy exclude lists :(

The problem is actually more complicated than that ... centericq also has no concept of proxy authentication.

A lot of people at Rhodes get around these problem by running a copy of squid on their own machine. This has always seemed a bit of overkill to me. Squid is overly complex for the task at hand. What I need is a simple proxy server that can make these decisions for me — basically the equivalent of Rhodes' proxy.pac auto-configuration file.

I had a hunt around at simple proxy servers (like tinyproxy). Everything I found either didn't do exclude lists, or didn't do authentication, or both. Then I discovered the HTTP::Proxy Perl module. This provides a simple way to write a custom proxy server. Just what I needed.

The result is simpleproxy. It has some config variables at the top. Other than that it just runs as a daemon and sends requests to the right place.

posted by guy at: 21:56 SAST | path: /general | permanent link

Thursday, November 18, 2004

mijail5 on FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE

As promised in my last post here is some more info on getting the mijail5 patch to apply to FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE.

posted by guy at: 23:14 SAST | path: /systems | permanent link

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE, Intel & mijail5

I've spent the last week or so upgrading all of our FreeBSD 5.x boxes to FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE. While for the most part these upgrades have gone very smoothly, I've had two issues which it might be worth sharing with people.

posted by guy at: 09:01 SAST | path: /systems | permanent link

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

HR & Auditors

Well this week has been fun ... in a twisted sort of way. I've had to deal with both human resources and external auditors, and strange combinations of the two.

The external auditors are always a ball of fun. They come here and tell us stuff we already knew and ask us to explain things we've already explained and then tell us we're all doing a bad job because we haven't fixed the things we told them we couldn't fix. And they do this twice a year or so. This time around it was things like password aging. "Why don't you have expiries set on the system passwords"; "Because password aging is enforced in the database and users are forced to change their password at the same time"; "You should enable both"; "If we run two seperate systems, they get out of sync when users change one password and not the other, and this leads to confusion. This way they're forced to change both passwords regularly and they don't get confused". You get the idea.

Human resources is another one of those areas you avoid like the plague. They have a reputation for not getting it, particularly when it comes to filling IT-related posts. This was amply demonstrated yesterday when it was clear that they had a completely different idea to us about where we were trying to go. Funnily enough, today they seemed to get it. The proof is always in the pudding though, and I'll believe it when I see a job advert in my local newspaper.

In a strange twist of fate, the auditors tell us they want to audit the HR system ... :-)

At least there was one good laugh though, thanks to daTechy.

posted by guy at: 18:31 SAST | path: /general | permanent link