30 Dec
2011
30 Dec
'11
6:47 p.m.
On 30 December 2011 15:54, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 6:55 AM, Liam Proven
<lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
Those are certainly both good reasons!
I must confess, I have been meaning to try to bring my RH 4-5-6 era
skills back up to date. Every test box I've tried Fedora on it's
failed to install, though (except VMs) and whereas CentOS installed
cleanly it didn't boot. As my motivation is just idle curiosity,
though, I've not really pursued or tried to troubleshoot this. I ought
to.
I do understand that it tends to dominate in the
US and very
US-dominated areas, though, and in the commercial paid-support sphere.
Quite so.
If I was working as a Linux sysadmin, I expect
I'd have to learn RHEL
or Centos and use it.
From 2003 through 2010, I used an RHEL or CentOS desktop/laptop every
day to maintain a pile of RHEL or CentOS servers (physical and
virtual). ?I bet on RedHat, professionally, starting with RH5.1, and
that made me a lot of money (plus it got me to the South Pole). My
most recent gig, however, is Ubuntu-Server-centric (there's some RHEL
and CentOS still, but more Solaris than those two combined). ?My
present position aside, I see many, many job postings here looking for
RHEL and/or CentOS skills and a much smaller number of posting seeking
Suse experience, and almost nothing else.
Matches what I see in business in the UK, TBH. But then, as my
sysadmin skills are not up to scratch for the modern world - I don't
speak Perl, Python or any other scripting language, I don't know
Nagios or Puppet or anything, and I don't really want to learn any
more - I am not gunning for Linux sysadmin work.
I'm not trying to claim RedHat is better, just the
most commonly
sought skill-set for Linux admins in the States. ?I've had my share of
frustration (especially with trying to use recent versions as a
workstation OS and most especially on laptops), but I think back to
how much "fun" we used to have trying to add hardware to monolithic
4BSD kernels that took 2-4 hours to recompile and how bad it was
trying to port applications and games from a SYSV world into the BSD
world, and modern Linux problems don't seem so hard anymore.
I started on SCO Xenix on 286s and later 386s, and on Linux with
Slackware in '95. You're definitely right there, even my that, weedier
comparison!
I started with 4BSD on a 2MB VAX-11/750 and Ultrix 1.1
on a 3MB
VAX-11/730. ?Lots of improvements since then, but unlike my
compatriots who were fiddling with MS-DOS, the commands and languages
and skills I learned 26 years ago are still relevant to my day-to-day
job (though it's nice to be doing it on hardware that costs hundreds
of dollars rather than hundreds of thousands of dollars - that's a
handy consequence of Moore's Law).
True! I do rather wish I had spent more effort on Unix back then,
myself, I must admit.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
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Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884