On Tuesday 09 August 2005 01:31 am, Mirko Steiner wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I would also prefer a few questions about essential "methods" not specaly
> based on C but for example:
>
> Whats the difference between ,,poll'' and ,,select''?
>
> I mean, michael schumacher (i don't like him that much but... for an
> example he'll good enought :)) knows about a motor how it works etc. Maybe
> he don't know how to install a camshaft but he know for what it is and how
> it works :)
>
> I'm also not THAT C god but most "good" or "better" admins I know also have
> knowledge about C... There are also python, bash, php programmer or people
> who doesn't have any knowledge about a language under it but its more an
> "administrative bruteforce" to see how this people admin a system.
>
> I don't want to insult someone, I'm sure there are some good admins that
> doesn't have any knowledge about a system near programming language... but
> it's more the "how it works" instead of "how i can use it" knowledge...
> Most people who have learned C (i dont mean this people who code an
> calculator in C++/Console and don't wonder why this thing have 15mb!), have
> also learned to solve problems systematicaly and structured.
>
> Just an example from my history... there are some webservers, having each a
> load from 20.0 arround (dual CPU) with 150 - 200 http connections each...
> so what was the solution? setting up two new webservers and putting them
> into the loadbalancer. There was no deeper look why this webservers running
> bad or something like that...
I would tend to agree with the Kevin Reiter type of opinion because "C
programming" is not an essential part of "Aministration" of a server. If you
are familiar with C than more power to you. I really don't understand the the
viewpoint of "a C programming background makes for a better admin". It seems
to me that most of the people who have chimed in with this viewpoint happened
to know C programmers who also happen to be good sys admins and that the non
C programmers that are sys admins are poor and not because they don't know C.
If they bought a "learning C" book and studied, they would not automagically
become good admins.
On the surface it appears to be analogous to buying the red car because red
goes the fastest and that all of the black cars are not fast at all. The
point of my stupid analogy being that one thing does not necessarily have to
do with another. There are many people out there with many different skills
and some know C, some don't.
I do however think that some high level scripting should be able to be done by
an admin, like creating a for(each) loop. I do not consider myself an
experienced admin but I can't think of a worse task than doing some highly
repetitive and tedious task for hours when a SMALL little shell/perl/whatever
script can be written to do it, and complete the task in a fraction of the
time. Example, I had a oversized mailbox account I had to clean out. There
was something like 200,000 e-mails. The end user was on a dial up and it
would take a very long time to download/delete all of the e-mails. I did not
have shell access to the server and even from my high speed connection using
a standard e-mail client trying to download all of the e-mails was taking a
VERY long time.
So I wrote a little script (foreach (1..200000) {print "delete $_\n";}) to
generate
delete 1
delete 2
delete 3
....
delete 199999
delete 200000
quit
Then I just opened a telnet connection on port 110 and pasted the above
contents into the telnet session and 5 minutes later all e-mails were
deleted.
Anyways, this is just my $.02
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