Coming Up to Speed

by Tina Darmohray
<tmd@usenix.org>

Tina Darmohray, editor of SAGE News & Features, is a consultant in the area of Internet firewalls and network connections, and frequently gives tutorials on those subjects. She was a founding member of SAGE.


I've been a UNIX system administrator for 15 years. That number isn't really accurate, however. I've been employed as a system administrator that long, but it's probably a stretch to claim that I've been a fully functional sysadmin the entire time. Like so many system administrators, I learned just about everything I know about system administration while on the job. So, while I was first hired in 1983, I probably wasn't worth a significant part of my salary for a good bit of time after that.

Luckily, I wasn't alone. Many of the employees on the project were also learning on the job. In fact, a small number of the more senior staff members readily admitted that they were there solely to learn about UNIX. They had come from years in the mainframe world and wanted to get some experience with the "new" operating system. They'd been working for years by then, and it showed. They were already senior system administrators and programmers. They knew about compilers, revision control systems, report generators, network stacks, system backups, IP addresses, disk drives, and all the rest of the standard computer fare. For the most part, they weren't learning new concepts; they were just applying what they already knew to a different environment and learning how to "do it in UNIX." They were coming up to speed with the "new" operating system.

Now I find myself in a similar situation. While I'll possibly never approach the competence of some of the senior staff members on that project, I'm no longer just learning my trade. I have a lot of experience to draw on now. Just as they were then, given a completely new OS environment, I'm still much farther ahead than someone just starting with his or her first one. I'm coming up to speed with NT.

Since it worked last time, I'm approaching this learning curve in the same way I did with UNIX. I've got some machines to play with, I've bought books, I'm reading articles and online information, and I'm talking with peers. In general, I like to learn, so I've been enjoying the opportunity to really delve into something new. Sadly, it all came to an abrupt stop a few weeks ago when I was pretty far down the path to understanding the NT authentication process and then hit a barrier. It was a Microsoft proprietary algorithm. Here I am, trying to educate myself so I can get better at NT, and I get to a point where I can't have an answer! It prompted me to think about how one "gets good at" something, which took me back to my first system administration job and how we all learned about UNIX. With UNIX, if you want to know something, you can buy books, talk to coworkers, read USENET (prior to the Web), attend tutorials, and, if you have the determination, you can finally resort to printing out the source code and figuring it out! Granted, you may wind up learning more than you ever needed to know, but ultimately that's your call, not someone else's, to make.

Somewhat deflated, I wondered if it was "just me." So, over the past several weeks, I've been polling people that I talk to see if they've had a similar experience or perception with NT. To a person, they have. Not all of them were bothered by it, but all of them agreed that, in some respects, your hands are tied from becoming an "expert" (in the traditional source-code-level "UNIX-guru" sense) with NT. Remarkably, I also ran into a related business article that said that some large companies were, surprisingly, choosing Linux over NT, even though it's not supported. Apparently, the reason is because companies want to be assured they have control over fixes, which isn't guaranteed when Microsoft "owns" the operating system. That makes sense to me, too, but I wouldn't have predicted it.

So, I'm left to wonder what this means for the level of expertise of NT system administrators. On one hand, my elementary school kids can use the popular word processing package on NT, almost intuitively (and, realistically, that's never going to happen with "vi"). From a system/network administrator perspective, however, I'm feeling a little like I'm left at the GUI level too. The high-level, and sometimes proprietary, NT interface to the system may mean that the NT "gurus" of the future have to settle for a more abstract level of knowledge than the UNIX gurus. I suppose we've lived with this knowledge restriction before, as in the days of OSes like MVS and VMS, but I'm not sure it's as much fun.