On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, Boaz Rymland wrote:
> As a Linux sys admin wannabe myself (no underestimation, just being
> objective) I feel a great need to know the inner working of the O.S.
> prior to learning how to manage a DNS, NIS, etc' (although they can be
> learned at the same time). That, IMHO, cannot be fully, comprehensively
> achieved without basic, but good, programming skills and knowledge.
this is quite true. the problem is that many people go into system
administration without going via the programming route first. a person can
be a very good system administrator without knowing how to write programs,
actually. they will be limited in the level of sophisticatin they can
achive (being dependant on other programmers to develope the tools for
them), but their knowledge is still very important for pure
administration. this is particularly important in a large site that has
several administrators, not all of them need to be programmers. rather,
some of them need to be experts at doing administration proper - for
example, how to mass-install patches on 10s or 100s of work-stations using
existing tools, how to mass-upgrade the OS on many systems. how to install
new software products that are needed by the users, etc. such skills
require no programming ability.
the same would go into analyzing network problems, analyzing configuration
problems, etc. one need not be a programmer in order to become an expert
in those aspects of administration.
> That's why I'm into a C++ tutorial these days, and on the horizon some
> awaiting a complementary Unix programming book.
> Don't you, experienced andknowledgeable sysadmins out there think this
> is a very important step in becoming a "full fledged" sysadmin ?
this is somewhere on the line between system administration and system
programming. indeed, in order to be anunlimited administrator, you should
be able to modify existing programs and add new features that your system
requires. be able to read source code so you can "inspect and secure"
open-source programs (using adam's notion here), boldly going where no
non-programmer administrator has gone before... :)
if that is what you want to become, then you'd be better off adding the
following books to your arsenal:
1. The C programming language, 2nd edition (by kerningham and ritchie).
2. The C++ programming language, 3rd edition (bjarn strousroup).
this one is not completely essential, as most tools you'll want to
write and modify are not written in C++ - except for hylafax and/or
kde.
3. Programming perl larry wall and someone else, i forgot his name).
4. a book about writing shell scripts - you will obviously want to fix
various shell scripts that come with your system or with products you
install - and too often they are written in bourjne shell or korn
shell.
5. The structure of the Unix operating system. (by moshe bach). and/or
The structure of the 4.4 BSD operating system (by someone else).
i might have gotten the names a bit twisted.
guy
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