

Is this a smart way to find a good sysadmin? - phred_pui
http://sysengquiz.tumblr.com/

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rachelbythebay
Only if you think that knowing the syntax of the puppet config language is a
show-stopper.

I mean, I could ask people the proper incantation to rebuild a sendmail
domaintable without using a helper Makefile. You either know it or you don't,
but it's not something everyone is going to know, and it's not 1:1 for whether
you're a good sysadmin or not.

Trivia is one thing, but blocking trivia?

~~~
phred_pui
The presumption was that puppet is an important standard in System Engineering
and thus important to know or at least to understand quickly (the stage is
solvable also without puppet knowledge, the errors are in the
brackets/puncutation)

~~~
rachelbythebay
Okay, so maybe it's not puppet, but then it's some other language... whatever
uses that => construct to do stuff. I assume it's Ruby or something else
that's Shiny these days, and that's not anything I normally use. As a result,
that part of it was very much based on poking around and trying different
things.

So now it's actually three things. One, it's puppet. Two, it's knowing that
puppet uses a particular language's pet syntax to convey things. Three, know
that syntax and apply fixes to the example until it can be parsed.

I guess if they're looking for someone who's going to power through it no
matter what, then it served its purpose.

BTW, awk vs. grep vs. cut? Come on. You can (ab)use all three tools to get
exactly the same output. grep takes a lot of stupid showboating, but it can be
done.

~~~
phred_pui
Cut doesn't work for finding a specific user. Grep could work, indeed, when
using -o. But this is not supported in posix grep - clarified in the quiz that
I meant the posix variant.

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Zanyinj
Loved the quiz:) Finished it, even though it's the first time i've ever heard
about puppet.

