home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
- Path: sparky!uunet!caen!nic.umass.edu!news.amherst.edu!twpierce
- From: twpierce@unix.amherst.edu (Tim Pierce)
- Subject: Re: Management of Jr. Unix Sys Admin
- Message-ID: <BzKuvI.7tL@unix.amherst.edu>
- Organization: Elitist Usenet Administrators, Turkey Division
- References: <1992Dec14.200135.9755@rd.hydro.on.ca> <1992Dec18.133136.3259@ccd.harris.com> <BETSYS.92Dec20130240@ra.cs.umb.edu>
- Distribution: na
- Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1992 21:40:30 GMT
- Lines: 36
-
- In article <BETSYS.92Dec20130240@ra.cs.umb.edu> betsys@cs.umb.edu (Elizabeth Schwartz) writes:
-
- >This is all off the top of my head. We do give students a lot of room.
-
- Until next Tuesday, I'm a student. Last fall we had one Unix machine
- (our main operations are all VMS-based) mainly for experiments and for
- motivated students. I was taking a course in compiler design at Mt.
- Holyoke College down the road which was based in a Unix environment
- under GCC, so I persuaded the computer center staff to let me install
- GCC for the course. Some time after that I installed rn so that I
- wouldn't have to use ANU News, and before long I'd also installed some
- other miscellaneous shells and tools.
-
- So when Amherst decided to move all newsreading-related jobs to Unix
- to ease the load on our creaking VAX/VMS systems, I was the one (being
- the person with the most hands-on Unix experience) to whom the task of
- installing and evaluating assorted newsreaders fell. By the end of
- this summer, I had installed the bulk of the non-vendor-supplied
- software on our system and have been doing most of the day-to-day
- tasks since, with a lot of policy discussions in between.
-
- What can be assigned to junior administrators? News maintenance
- (addgroup, rmgroup) is pretty straightforward. People with a working
- knowledge of shell programming can do nearly any script-related task,
- and people with a decent knowledge of C can work on bug fixes. A
- simple knowledge of where system software is located (and the hardware
- specs, such as endianness) is all that's usually required for software
- installation. If I had a clearer, more distinct idea of what *I've*
- been doing over the last few months, I might have more ideas. :-) I'd
- probably also have more ideas about how to compartmentalize system
- administration if our Unix operation were larger.
-
- --
- ____ Tim Pierce /
- \ / twpierce@unix.amherst.edu / Rocks say goodbye.
- \/ (BITnet: TWPIERCE@AMHERST) /
-