On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 01:01:15PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: > On 05/30/08 21:17, Douglas A. Tutty wrote: > [snip] > > > > However, I'm of the opinion firmly that the lessons and skills learned > > in those times which became the mainframe culture gives rise to a > > different type of sysadmin than unix does. Even in the same company. > > I've known IBM people and the AIX types are fundamentally different than > > the (now) Z/OS types. Unfortunaly, I haven't collected enough quarters > > [1] from them to join the ranks. > > My opinion on that is that Unix as always been predominately > weighted towards interactive and daemon processes, whereas > mainframes were/are weighted towards batch jobs (even CICS is a > batch job), batch queues and job schedulers. Cron really is a poor > substitute for batch queues and a job scheduler. >
But you confuse an OS (e.g. UNIX) on the one hand with hardware (e.g. mainframe) on the other. Sure, that used to be the case but now you have zVM with hundreds (thousands?) of VMs each running the OS most appropriate for the job, e.g. AIX, or Debian, zOS. I agree that the OSs have their focus and e.g. people would rather sit down to a bash prompt than a whatever-it-is in VMS, MVS, zOS, etc. Perhaps mainframe types are the people who can think in acronyms and the Unix types are the people who can think in conjoined words and shortforms (e.g. umount, rm, mv). Perhaps its the virtuality of services since the virtual machine is implemented largely in hardware. The mainframe types provide virtual machines for the individual vm administrators to administrate remotely. A hardware change can be transparent to the vm admin and service users. It may also breed a more cautious approach; crashing a mainframe can be like hitting the emergency power cutoff in a data center full of thousands of unix rackmount hosts. rm) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]