present day admin skills: Re: The Morris worm to Nimda, how little we've learned or gained

["R. DuFresne" <dufresne () sysinfo com>]

These are real life experisnces from the past year, they are not madeup:

A middle level unix admin needs to convert a file of all upppercase chars
to one of all lower case chars.  so he does it like this:

ftp's the file to their windows desktop from the unix server, opens the
file in word, does the conversion, save the file to a new name, closes
word, the ftp's the faile back to the unix server, moves it into place
and hopefully, though not always, chmods the file for the user who made
the request.  The chmod might actually take an additional call/trouble
ticket from the requester to get the task fully completed.

The easy way:  # tr A-Z a-z < /home/luser/file > /home/luser/newfile

It should not even take a chomd, though, perhaps so OS' will require that
extra step, and certainly any decent admin will in fact make sure <ls -l
/home/luser/newfile> the perms are correct for luser before hanging up the
phone or closing out the trouble ticket they are working on.

A middle level admin needs to schedule a process in the wee hours of the
morning, I can't recall if it was a reboot or backup of a filesystem or
what, but that does not matter.

Their process:

Drive home, do dinner, sleep awhile then getup and drive 30-45 mins to the
office, loging and issue the command, drive back home, go back to bed and
come in late the next day.

The easy way:  

# at 2:00 AM
command
^D
Job 2 will be executed using /bin/sh

This is the kind of support admins we constantly encounter.  And even when
both admins were directed to the easy path, because they could not parse a
man page, nor gleen the information from their copy of Unix In A Nutshell, 
nor explicit instructions on how to use the simple command described
above, they persisted in their versions of completing the task.
This is what we refer to continuously when citing the lack of skills
common in the corporate infrastructure of many companies this day in age.
People do not seem to learn well, nor adapt well to change and/or new
information, even when spoonfed.  These are the folks managing production
systems.  They are the folks that login as themselves, untar an
application sourceball, do a make;make install, and never once look at the
file ownerships and make the appropriate changes, so that 4 years after
they have left the company the file they installed are no longer owned by
anyone on the system, or worse yet, their accounts have had to remain
active so that the ownership issues are "not a problem".  Nevermind that
even after these corrections are made due to security audits, that when a
disk crashes or something catostrophic on the server requires a restore
from backups that the same issues are spewed back onto the systems.
 
Now, tell me this makes folks comfy with the skills of the persons that
the current IT industry has been hiring for the past 10-20 years?  Tell me
that it really requires a senior level admin to know the easy way to do
the tasks outlined above rather then a mid-level or lower level admin to
do such things, when I can go to any #linux channel on any irc server and
find 12 year olds that know these commands, and know them well or at least
parse this info from the man page or their copy of Unix In A Nutshell.
this bode well for the future,  but it remains a solid issue today. 


Thanks,


Ron DuFresne
-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
        admin & senior consultant:  sysinfo.com
                  http://sysinfo.com

"Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity.  It
eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the
business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation."
                -- Johnny Hart

testing, only testing, and damn good at it too!













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