Re: [SAGE] sys admin podcast

["Jason Dusek" <jason.dusek@xxxxxxxxx>]

  I'm as much a developer as a sysadmin, but the emphasis I lay
  on system administration is very much greater than the other
  developers in my organization.

  For example, I've always felt that LDAP was very worthwhile;
  it's ridiculous to maintain separate usernames and passwords
  across web services and even different machines (a situation
  that leads to the infamous "staff" account). People I've
  worked with generally regard this stuff as black magic, though
  -- I've had one supervisor tell me that cross-site
  authentication is "a dream".

  The company culture here lays emphasis on privacy and security
  -- and so the sell for LDAP was the ease with which passwords
  could be changed in the event of a security breach or employee
  termination.

  There is what we might call a "culture of applications" in
  system administration, a perspective that emphasizes reuse. If
  the application does a little more than necessary, that's okay
  -- we turn off that part while appreciating the collective
  wisdom represented by the room for further growth. The
  "culture of algorithms" that dominates in engineering, though,
  leads to an emphasis on clarity and sparseness, and carries a
  certain do-it-yourself spirit to it. From this point of view,
  system administrators are little better than script kiddies,
  piecing together systems from components they (don't have time
  or need to) fully understand. System administrators, when
  tasked with a service routing problem, will likely want to
  know what the distributed, fault-tolerant DNS has to offer;
  engineers, however, will have to be talked out of writing some
  distributed, fault-tolerant, cracked-out system in Erlang.

--
_jsn