

Does the distro matter when applying for a job as a Linux admin? - Sandman
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/does-distro-matter

======
jsz0
"Why, in the Linux world should it matter if I have experience with CentOS
instead of Unbreakable?"

I think it should matter to employers. No doubt you could learn OEL very
quickly but I'm sure it has a bunch of little oddities and quirks that could
make the day-to-day administration and troubleshooting more difficult for
someone without practical OEL experience. From the employer's stand point if
they can find someone who knows PAC & OEL inside-out why would they take any
chances? It may reflect the job market more than your skill set or the company
policies on recruitment. It's _very_ likely they can find a candidate who
meets their exact requirements. (Personally I would have just lied and spent
the next couple of days learning OEL inside-out to back up my lies)

~~~
nailer
I agree in general - if you were pure Debian/Ubuntu and didn't know how to
create RPMs, use yum, know the Satellite API, kickstart, python, etc., then
you wouldn't be great at something RHEL based.

But OEL is just a RHEL clone - literally everything is the same except the
logos, release file and installer artwork - so if you know RHEL or CentOS then
the experience is valuable.

------
olefoo
Yes and No. In my opinion, it's more a reflection of the culture of the shop
in which it is used than the specifics of a distribution.

A good admin should be able to get up to speed on any distro within a few days
and should be able to wrangle BSDs and other more exotic flavours of unix
derived OS's easily.

What really matters is the history of the shop and the systems and the culture
which has grown up around them. Any distro can be badly managed. If you're
logging in to the servers using a VNC session as root, you're doing it wrong,
no matter what distro is supporting you.

Being an admin at an established shop does entail a certain amount of putting
up with decisions that were implemented before you showed up. What matters is
if you are going to have the authority that goes with the responsibility that
your are being asked to take on. If the expectation is that you will keep a
patched together system on the air it matters a lot whether you are expected
to replace it and manage the transition to a new infrastructure with grace and
aplomb; or if you're being asked to be the janitor in a lunatic asylum where
all the devs have root on the production machines and you'll only find out
about changes when the system breaks...

The first is a professional challenge, the latter is a path to madness.

------
ax0n
It really ought to matter. You take someone with quite a bit of experience in
just RHEL or CentOS, and you hire them to work on Ubuntu Server LTS? They'd
probably figure it out, but you'd probably have been better off finding
someone with less overall Linux experience that is competent with Ubuntu
Server or any other Debian-family distro.

Fortunately, there's a relatively small core of distros used in the enterprise
-- at least when compared to the vast array of all distros under development.

I'd think a "Linux sysadmin" worth their salt would be a student of the main
families of distros, but competency in the relevant distro should matter when
it comes time to hire. Of course, a rockstar sysadmin would know most linux
distros, plus some other not-Linux OSes (any or all of Windows, Solaris, AIX,
HP-UX, *BSDs and the list keeps going)

~~~
olefoo
'rockstar sysadmin' - Seems like a bit of a contradiction to me. A sysadmin is
supposed to be the cool head in a crisis who set things up so that even in
extreme circumstances the systems are still functional. And yet able to
improvise effectively when the circumstances require it. If you're looking for
cultural icons, sysadmins are more like Scotty or McGyver than they are like
Mick jagger or Gwen Stefani.

~~~
nailer
As well as 'the cool head', they're also the guy that automates the shit out
of everything - OS installs, software deploys, reporting, monitoring, etc.
Ideally, most sysadmin work should be automation rather than fixing shit,
because you've automated some kind of pre-emptive check and redundancy.

Anything that saves a bucketload of time for other people deserves rockstar-
like adoration, in my humble opinion.

~~~
olefoo
That's exactly right. Automation raises the value of a system administrator,
it's a multiplier whereby one man can do the work of dozens.

Optimization and performance tuning is another multiplier, if you can tweak a
set of application servers to serve twice as many sessions you've just doubled
the number of visitors you can serve before you need to buy more machinery, or
cut your hosting costs in half if you're running on third-party equipment.

------
Imprecate
If they're specifically looking for someone who needs to hit the ground
running almost immediately doing work tightly connected to package management,
automated updates, or relations with the vendor, then yes.

I could only see that being the case for short-term contract work.

~~~
robryan
And from the article it doesn't sound to be the case. It's the same thing that
happens with programming languages.

------
staunch
From the submission title: "Does the distro matter when applying for a job as
a Linux admin?" Yes. Almost certainly some clueless people will care whether
you've specifically used their flavor of Linux.

From the article title: "Does the distro matter?" No. The differences among
Linux distros is so slight that any otherwise qualified/competent admin can be
expected to easily learn everything important in days or weeks.

~~~
jrockway
_The differences among Linux distros is so slight that any otherwise
qualified/competent admin can be expected to easily learn everything important
in days or weeks._

Not sure I agree. After years of using Debian, I had a hard time administering
CentOS. yum is a cruel joke... and that's when the dependencies aren't messed
up. The quality control and the intrinsic design is ... inconsistent. This
makes it hard to administer, and I would certainly never take a job where I
would be responsible for CentOS or Redhat.

~~~
staunch
So, do you disagree that "any otherwise qualified/competent admin" could
easily learn to use a different distro than the one(s) they know?

(I've noticed an increase in the number of replies I get like this on HN now.
Time was people made an effort to reply to what you actually said (and meant),
not just state some tangentially related populist opinion. Maybe it's just me
though...)

~~~
bugs
Someone competent with linux ( More than "Oh I run a vps all by myself")
should easily be able to learn how to do the same administration tasks on
another.

It may end up taking longer to do certain tasks and they may have to refer to
documentation more often than someone competent in that distro thinks they
should but linux is relatively universal and once you get past initial setup
maintenance becomes rather similar.

~~~
jrockway
_maintenance becomes rather similar_

In that any task can be completed in an unbounded amount of time. If you want
to do things quickly, though, all Linuxes are _not_ the same.

------
justinhj
I'd be looking for an admin that is aware of the major distros and knows the
strengths and weaknesses of each. Learning the differences in a new one is
straightforward, but being the kind of person to actively investigate the
bigger picture is far more valuable.

------
silentbicycle
You can learn a given Linux distro, or you can learn Unix. There is a
difference.

The fast (but painful) way to learn is to work on porting.

~~~
nailer
Agreed, there certainly is a difference. But 'Unix' is often used as a
shorthand for a bunch of committee-created standards that people don't use
anymore. Eg, POSIX shell will break when handling file names and data with
spaces in them.

The defaults in the current Unix OSs - RHEL, SLES, Debian/Ubuntu, OS X,
FreeBSD - don't match the 'standard' either - most of these, for example, are
moving away from SysV init to something that handles dependencies (rather than
starting an SMTP server when there's no network). None of these OSs use SysV
packages either.

It's certainly valuable to learn multiple Unixs, but make sure that's
practical experience rather than an expired 'standard'.

------
c00p3r
there are just two things remains: apt-cache search/apt-get install and yum
search/install =) If you know rpmbuild --rebuld or dpkg-buildpackage you're
enlightened guru. If you were realized that it is possible to rebuild Fedora's
.src.rpm on CentOS you could be compared to Krishna himself. =)

btw, Someone still hiring "Linux admins"? I can do it for free. =)

