[nycbug-talk] Hypothetical: the end of the sysadmin/systems engineer/DBA?

[Matt Juszczak]

> Your are on point, your reference to the tripwire yellow book is
> exactly how things are done at my place of employment. One of my
> primary roles is to migrate our tomcat application from Windows to
> Linux, I'm in between development and the application support teams.
> One day, after spending another week troubleshooting an issue that
> turned out to be a application configuration problem again. I turned
> to my manager and told him we need to adopt a policy of rebuilding
> systems rather than troubleshooting. I suggested this because I
> realize that its difficult to troubleshoot something you don't have
> control over, when you have another team that insist the issue is on
> your end and you have to prove them wrong before they take a closer
> look at their configs.

I agree and disagree with this.  I think anything at this point that isn't 
standardized should be rebuilt in general into a standardized setup 
(puppet, openldap, centralized DNS, etc.).  But then, rebuilding is easy - 
you just install a new instance, launch it, and have puppet configure it.

Are you saying that if one tiny thing breaks, you rebuild the whole 
instance anyway?  Or are you saying that if something major breaks, and 
the box becomes too unmanageable?

> You also mentioned project management and writing, you are absolutely
> right about that as well. One thing I've realized since working as a
> sysadmin is, you don't come across developers or support personnel who
> understands infrastructure or understands something simple as how the
> OS you are running boots. My writing skills sucks, and my project
> management is improving. The little I know of both has helped me deal
> with these two groups of people which lead to us "Solving hard
> business oriented problems". I've also noticed some people in IT just
> stopped learning, and sadly some of these people are now managers, so
> knowing how to articulate something in writing can take you a long
> way.

The latter is quite sad actually =(