lmc@denelcor.UUCP (10/04/83)
With regards to the message asking whether an non-UNIX experienced system administrator can easily become a UNIX guru, I can offer my own experience: I was a systems programmer with experience on MODCOMP Classics, Modcomp II's, DG Nova's, Standard Computer IC7000's (*that* is a story in itself), and XDS Sigma series (ah, now there was an architecture). No DEC, no IBM, no CDC, no micro experience at the time (1978). I was drafted into a project at a major aerospace company which had fore-ordained a VAX system with UNIX for initial program requirements analysis and documentation, and asked to tradeoff the UNIcies available, configure it and the VAX, and be the system guru. While I knew a fair amount about UNIX at the time, I had no hands-on experience with it, even as a user. I specified 4.1bsd for a VAX 780, and did the procurement. As part of this, we bought one week of time from a well-known UNIX consultant to do initial startup and to get our procedures in line. He came on Monday. The software arrived on Tuesday, thanks to a lot of effort from several people on the west coast. We had the system running by Tuesday evening, had most of the software running Wednesday (including all of the Rand software - mh, the Rand editor, etc) and users were on the system on Thursday. On Saturday, after the consultant left, both system disks (and the drives) suffered head crashes. The tape drive had been out of alignment (it was brand new) and had been realigned on Friday, so all the backups were bad. Your classic Murphy. It took a week for DEC to scrape together enough heads to get two RM05s working again. When I finally got the system back, I managed to redo all the work that we had done together over the weekend, with the help of the Berkeley documentation set. From then through the next two years, there was no occasion to use the support services we bought, and only a few calls made to the consultant to get some item or another straight. That same project (minus myself) now has two VAXs and a UNIVAC 1100/82 (running UNIX-1100 from AT&T), and a single associate level engineer as guru (although he is somewhat exceptional). I also was required to teach rudimentary unix operations to most of the 120 people (mostly engineers, some managers, secretaries, etc) who had to use the VAX. In this I found the learn processor distributed with 4.1 to be a good starting point, after cleaning a number of errors in the lessons out. I even wrote a set of lessons for the Rand editor. Now, they are not doing anything extraordinary with their systems; just normal document processing (some huge nroff's), applications programs, and internal mail. Nor can I say that I am exceptional; I just happen to have experience on a lot of (really) different kinds of systems. The ease with which I was able to perform my job, in the face of *no* UNIX or VAX experience, sold me on UNIX (at least Berkeley's type) as the kind of system on which I want to work. The moral: if you have any knowlege about operating systems and system administration, you too can be a UNIX wizard. I don't think that can be said for a lot of operating systems. I'm sending this through the news. In my ignorance I do not know how to send something from our system to an address like: ...sri-unix!FIGMO@kestrel If someone would be so kind, I may learn something new. If anyone finds this narrative instructing/amusing/apt-to-the-philosophy-discussion, so much the better. Lyle McElhaney ...{hao|brl-bmd}!denelcor!lmc