Re: [SAGE] Complexity of sysadmin scripts/programs in your organization?

["Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH" <allbery@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Apr 9, 2008, at 21:22 , Eric Wannemacher wrote:
> How much programming are sysadmins allowed to do in your organizations
> and how does the org maintain the level of knowledge to support those
> programs after individuals move on?  I am talking about long lived
> scripts/programs and not throwaway data cleanup scripts.

We require everyone to have at least (preferably sysadmin-oriented)  
Perl programming skills.  Most of our stuff is perl although there  
are some shell scripts and one ruby script; this is an improvement  
over when it was a mishmash of shell, awk, perl, m4 (let me tell you,  
printcap.m4 was a trip), a few C programs, etc.

I'm hoping that I will get time to start migrating to bcfg2 which  
should make a lot of the above go away or at least be greatly  
simplified.  (The fact that it's introducing yet another scripting  
language is somewhat annoying, though.  And yes, there are good  
reasons to go with bcfg2 despite that.)

> Are you limiting the languages that can be used to "scripting"
> languages?  Limiting the complexity?  Specifically hiring people with
> programming backgrounds?
>
>
> Thanks,
> Eric Wannemacher

--
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@xxxxxxxxx
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@xxxxxxxxxxx
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH