[Gllug] Cost of RedHat vs Ubuntu desktop support

[JLMS]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 10:16 AM, Bruce Richardson<itsbruce at workshy.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 09:20:12AM +0100, JLMS wrote:
>>
>> You are a very optimistic, very lucky, or both.
>>
>> How it is productive to have a great programmer doing system
>> administration work?
>
> Desktop support isn't sysadmin work.

Says who? You are clearly joking.

> Application, server and network
> maintenance, release process tasks, those kind of things are sysadmin
> work.  If somebody is doing desktop support and calling themselves a
> sysadmin, thats... not what I would call them.

How would you call them then?

There are industries in which desktop computers are as complex as any
server and require as much planning and hand holding as the most
complex of them, in other industries the challenges of deploying tens
or hundreds of identical machines, maintaining them and securing them
is a skill that you don't acquire by administering  a LAMP stack or
designing High availability systems.

But feel free to make your own definitions. I find this snobbish view
of part of the field unacceptable.

> If a developer messes up
> their local copy of the repository or nukes their hard disk, they get a
> set of installation disks and learn not to be so stupid next time.

I am sorry, but we will have to agree to disagree.

How you consider productive humiliating in this way a developer  is
beyond me. The system administrator job is to ensure other people
don't find themselves in this situation at all.

I am not in the business of educating people or humiliating them, I am
in the business of making their lives easier, and this should include
an environment in which they can't nuke things and in which they never
ever change hats to become system administrator (or whatever you
prefer to call the function), I surely need their agreement and
understanding, and I would be damned if an user of mine finds himself
in the situation that you describe.


>
>> Or a Sys Admin running like a headless chicken
>> because, yet again, somebody broke something?
>
> I managed a team of sysadmins in a medium size web consultancy for
> several years and never had that problem.

I think we are coming from completely different angles of the
industry. The developers I have worked with charge £300 to £500 a day
for their work, in such an environment it is simply not applicable to
waste their time asking them to fix things, I still fail to understand
in which environment it is a good idea.

>
>> In any operation bigger than two guys in their garage, somebody should
>> be nominated as the infrastructure maintainer and be given the power
>> to do his job.
>
> If you can't set up your various environments (office, development,
> staging/UAT/OAT, production) so that they are protected from the
> inevitable accidents and misjudgements of developers, you're in the
> wrong job.
>

I don't see why or how,  from my statement you go in a tirade about
segregating environments.

The environments can be perfectly segregated, but still people could
be forced to "learn not to be so stupid next time", one thing,
regrettably, doesn't preclude the other.
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