Re: Sysadmin (Was: position opening up here)

First: The quoted text here is not properly formatted because I had to copy and paste it from the digest.

Damien, I'm not sure if your question was a statement or a question. Statement meaning, "I don't think LDAP RADIUS, and Perl have anything to do with being a system administrator", and the question meaning, "How should I prioritize this in my long list of things to work on?"

I will respond the same way regardless:

LDAP is important because you can use it for authentication. Like Windows and Active Directory, LDAP can be used to authenticate and control users. Managing a ton of servers with a ton of users gets really old, really fast - but with LDAP, you could easily set up a tree and set the servers to authenticate using LDAP. You could set up a simple app or web page to change passwords, update users, and the like, and the nightmare of user management is now just a slightly disturbing dream (there's still other things to worry about, of course.) At work, we use LDAP to authenticate FTP users, email users (and some aliases) and plug it into RADIUS for Dialup and DSL authentication. Some of the programs using LDAP: ProFTP, FreeRADIUS, Postfix, Sendmail, Courier Imap/Pop, and some other POP program called 'popper'.

Perl is useful, very, very useful. It's a lot faster and easier than sed,awk, and so forth on the command line, butit makes doing a ton of things a lot easier. We use it for web pages (the ticket system is custom made out of perl) as well as cron jobs, reporting, and all that. It's pretty easy to learn, although it seems like Python is gaining ground.

RADIUS is a bit less integral to system admin. You can use RADIUS for authentication of a lot of things, but if you don't have a lot of dialup users, it is less useful.

I've said (though not on this list) that system admin is less a specialty type job, and more of a 'jack of all trades, master of none' type setup. I liken it to the 'sliding window protocol [1] ' concept from a college course I took. I'll be very familiar with things that I'm working on currently, and other tasks outside the window fall by the wayside. Once the window slides over other tasks, I start remembering more things, and become closer to an 'expert' on those things again. There are people that can hold all that info in their heads all the time, but I'm not one of those people.

</Rambling>

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliding_window

> Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 13:37:54 -0800
> From: Damien Hull <dhull@digitaloverload.net>
> Subject: Re: Sysadmin Position opening up soon here
>
> Where does LDAP, RADIUS, and Perl fit in the long list of things a
> sysadmin should know?
>
> I'm still planning to take the LPIC exam/certification. I know one > of
> the exams requires LDAP knowledge . I think Perl is something a > good
> sysadmin should know something about. Don't know where RADIUS fits. > It
> is used in wireless security when WPA2 is used.
>
>I don't really know LDAP but I'm learning. Tried playing with RADIUS > a
> while back but don't really know that either. Perl is something > > I've
> never messed with. Should I start learning these things or can I >stick
> them on the to do list?

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Received on Sat Apr 21 14:11:51 2007