[Beowulf] 9 traits of the veteran Unix admin

Robert G. Brown rgb at phy.duke.edu
Wed Feb 16 10:13:45 PST 2011


On Wed, 16 Feb 2011, Prentice Bisbal wrote:

> Anyone see this yet? He's pretty dead on, IMHO, especially 5,6,9
>
>
> http://www.infoworld.com/t/unix/nine-traits-the-veteran-unix-admin-276

I think he's a bit narrow about vi -- I understand it, you have to be
competent with vi because vi is the only editor that (used to) be in
/sbin and hence might well be the only editor you have to work with
(except for ed) on a crashed system.  But real sysadmins don't
necessarily LIKE to work with vi, and emacs isn't the only alternative.
One of the best admins I've known worked with joe, a wordstar clone, and
was very happy with it.  I personally am crippled without jove (a
C-based binary, non-lisp small emacs ("Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs).
It is lightning fast, can do the integrated compiler/editor debugging
thing that emacs does, is highly customizable (but not as much as
emacs), and is NOT all things to all humans (although I have run
multiple shells in multiple jove windows instead of using e.g. screen or
multiple xterms, I don't view it as an operating environment).

Am I a veteran?  Well, I started doing Unix sysadmin in 1986.  Not the
veteranist of all veterans, but not exactly a tyro either...;-)

Most of the rest, sure.

    rgb

>
> --
> Prentice
>
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Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu





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