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a workday rant
Mar. 18th, 2004 11:57 amI have been reading the Red Hat sysadmin primer.
I like the introductory material-- a real gem in the professional approach to the work that it attempts to foster: document everything, communicate, automate everything possible, be aware of the business needs of the organization you work for.
But there's a long middle section on the subject of system tuning which seems so... archaic. It used to be that memory, disk, CPU cycles etc. where very very valuable resources, to the point that it made sense to hire deep magic wizards to wring every drop of usefulness out of these resources. Now, users know when their computer is too slow, and they know the solution to that: they buy a newer computer. The newer computer has a faster chip, more memory and more disk, guaranteed. This may be overkill if memory was the issue but the CPU was fine or vice versa, and yeah, it would be nice to get optimal use out of your hardware. But management isn't going to hire someone to grovel through the output of vmstat and top when buying new hardware would be cheaper, quicker, and-- let's face it-- more fun.
To be blunt: if laying you off will free up money to buy more than enough hardware to make your job obsolete, management will eventually figure this out, and you will be laid off. Thus I suspect that knowing how to run iostat and sadc are probably negatively correlated with job security in most settings.
I like the introductory material-- a real gem in the professional approach to the work that it attempts to foster: document everything, communicate, automate everything possible, be aware of the business needs of the organization you work for.
But there's a long middle section on the subject of system tuning which seems so... archaic. It used to be that memory, disk, CPU cycles etc. where very very valuable resources, to the point that it made sense to hire deep magic wizards to wring every drop of usefulness out of these resources. Now, users know when their computer is too slow, and they know the solution to that: they buy a newer computer. The newer computer has a faster chip, more memory and more disk, guaranteed. This may be overkill if memory was the issue but the CPU was fine or vice versa, and yeah, it would be nice to get optimal use out of your hardware. But management isn't going to hire someone to grovel through the output of vmstat and top when buying new hardware would be cheaper, quicker, and-- let's face it-- more fun.
To be blunt: if laying you off will free up money to buy more than enough hardware to make your job obsolete, management will eventually figure this out, and you will be laid off. Thus I suspect that knowing how to run iostat and sadc are probably negatively correlated with job security in most settings.
