Dangerous levels of luserishness among sysadmin candidates?

[Niklas Karlsson]

A while back I had an interviewer praise me because I was able to
describe in broad strokes how IP over Ethernet works (the usual litany
about NECvat sbe gur qrfgvangvba be tngrjnl, etc). "Very few people are
able to describe it on that level, I was told.

The supply of sysadmin candidates really must be teeming with lusers.
Routing protocols and advanced switching, you only need to know if
you're actually a networking BOFH, but how IP works from the perspective
of the source and destination nodes is really something any sysadmin
worth his salt should be able to recite in hisher sleep.

Worrying, even if it does mean I'm able to look superior.

Niklas

[Roger Bell_West]

Post by Niklas Karlsson
A while back I had an interviewer praise me because I was able to
describe in broad strokes how IP over Ethernet works (the usual litany
about NECvat sbe gur qrfgvangvba be tngrjnl, etc). "Very few people are
able to describe it on that level, I was told.

The magic Internet fairies take your data, make a copy for Google and
another for the NSA, and...

Meanwhile at $ORK:

Networks people: we don't like these things about your site.

Me: fair enough, I'll fix them.

Networks people: how long do you expect to take?

Me: well, I've just done the first half.

[Grant Taylor]

Post by Niklas Karlsson
A while back I had an interviewer praise me because I was able to
describe in broad strokes how IP over Ethernet works (the usual litany
about NECvat sbe gur qrfgvangvba be tngrjnl, etc). "Very few people are
able to describe it on that level, I was told.

"NECvat sbe gur qrfgvangvba be tngrjnl"?

Post by Niklas Karlsson
The supply of sysadmin candidates really must be teeming with lusers.

I've had some really sad applicants in my career. Some of whom have
said that 192.0.2.1/24 and 198.51.100.1/24 are in the same subnet and
can communicate with each other "because the netmask is the same".

Post by Niklas Karlsson
Routing protocols and advanced switching, you only need to know if you're
actually a networking BOFH, but how IP works from the perspective of the
source and destination nodes is really something any sysadmin worth his
salt should be able to recite in hisher sleep.

I agree that any decent system administrator needs to have a basic
understanding of how networking works.

My main desires in candidates is:

· Properly identify if a system is in the local subnet or not.
· Understand what a route is for.
· Understand what a router / (default) gateway is for.

I would also like to see some basic understanding of things like
HTTP(S), SMTP, and DNS. Particularly the application layer protocol(s)
that run on the systems that they administer.

Post by Niklas Karlsson
Worrying, even if it does mean I'm able to look superior.

I've been worrying too. I've had 30 year seasoned unix administrators
think that they can access more of the Internet by arbitrarily changing
the netmask from /24 to /16 or even /8 and then wonder why they could no
longer get to things outside of the original /24.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die

[Niklas Karlsson]

Post by Grant Taylor

Post by Niklas Karlsson
A while back I had an interviewer praise me because I was able to
describe in broad strokes how IP over Ethernet works (the usual litany
about NECvat sbe gur qrfgvangvba be tngrjnl, etc). "Very few people are
able to describe it on that level, I was told.

"NECvat sbe gur qrfgvangvba be tngrjnl"?

Lrf; ba gur fnzr fhoarg lbh pna fraq qverpgyl gb gurve ZNP, ba n
qvssrerag fhoarg lbh fraq gur cnpxrgf gb gur tngrjnl (qrsnhyg ebhgr be
zber fcrpvsvp).

Niklas

[Alexander Schreiber]

Post by Niklas Karlsson
A while back I had an interviewer praise me because I was able to
describe in broad strokes how IP over Ethernet works (the usual litany
about NECvat sbe gur qrfgvangvba be tngrjnl, etc). "Very few people are
able to describe it on that level, I was told.
The supply of sysadmin candidates really must be teeming with lusers.
Routing protocols and advanced switching, you only need to know if
you're actually a networking BOFH, but how IP works from the perspective
of the source and destination nodes is really something any sysadmin
worth his salt should be able to recite in hisher sleep.
Worrying, even if it does mean I'm able to look superior.

Hah, you have no idea. I do interviewing @ $EMPLOYER and for quite a while
our recruiters have been giving me only NALSD interviews. And the
number of candidates that actually manage to come up with somewhat
workable designs is ... depressingly low. You'll get gems like people
cheerfully feeding 100k tps to a single spindle of spinning rust.
Or using raid0 over 10+ spindles for revenue critical data because "I've
got a second copy in DC2, it'll be fine". Or handling 10+ GB/s incoming
traffic on a single machine, including writing to stable storage.

Kind regards,
Alex.