Subject: RE: Comment Items
From: "Jaszkowiak, Joe" <joe.jaszkowiak@navteq.com>
Date: 12/9/2011 3:34 PM
To: "'Tim Preuss'" <tim.preuss@minnesota.edu>

Tim,

                I know it’s been a while since you sent this, but I do want to share my feedback based on my experience in the various areas you touch on.

 

I cannot think of a single individual on my systems and network administration teams have NOT had to write at least a simple script in the past year. The advice that I have given many junior systems administrators just starting their careers has been “script yourself out of a job, and then you can move on to bigger and better jobs”. Scripting has changed quite a bit over the years however. When I started in the industry, most of the scripting was done with shell, perl or batch. Now it’s powershell, ruby and a bit of perl and shell. The tools have gotten much better too. Configuration management has become a key component of my team’s jobs, not only on the server, network and application side of the house, but also in the desktop environment. Obviously it is less important in a small shop, but as the environment grows, or moves to the cloud, it becomes important.

 

I think that the “blue collar” administrator will soon become a thing of the past. I don’t have a crystal ball that could tell us when that will occur, but I’ve already seen the demand for these types of individuals decrease in the areas of the industry that I pay attention to. The reason behind this is that more and more of the “nuts and bolts” type services are now available from the cloud (see Office 365 and Google Apps as a few examples), and significant hardware consolidation and automation in the enterprise. This has been enabled by technologies such as Wmware and storage virtualization as well as automation tools such as CFengine, CiscoWorks, BMC and CA tool suites that take over many of the manual / redundant tasks. Additionally, with most companies being very cost conscious these days, it’s tough to find any IT activities that don’t require alignment with business nees and strategies.

 

February and March next year look like they will be quite busy for me, but I certainly should be able to attend the meeting given a bit of notice. I hope all is well and that you have a wonderful Christmas and a successful New Year.

 

Best regards

-Joe

 

From: Tim Preuss [mailto:tim.preuss@minnesota.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, November 01, 2011 5:08 PM
To: joe.jaszkowiak@navteq.com
Subject: Comment Items

 

Hi Folks,

 

I normally don't send out a message after the advisory meeting, but I have a couple of items I wanted to send your way. Should you be inclined, I would be interested in your comments on any of the items below.

This link suggests all system administrators must know scripting and a change management system. I've heard of change management for Cisco configurations, but not all configurations. I don't see this as a high priority right now. However, I think I should setup a change management system for the students to use. The link is http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2009/08/the-future-of-system-administration/

 I don't remember the site, but one person suggested white collar/blue collar network administrators. The white collar admins would be writing scripts and aligning to business needs/strategies. The blue collar would do manual/redundant work that had not be automated for various reasons.

This link suggests two levels of system administration going into the future. This presentation argues we need to teach some business concepts along with everything else. The link is http://usenix.org/events/lisa06/tech/slides/couch.pdf

I went to the SIGITE (ACM Special Interest Group Information Technology Educators) conference at West Point, NY this year. EMC and NetAPP both want to be my friend and provide me with teaching materials. EMC told me they could connect me with teaching materials for Vmware. Right now, it looks like EMC is a course(s) and NetAPP is individual modules I may add. I would be interested in any opinions and/or requests for more information.

The room we currently have the advisory meeting (B150) has a vpn link to a classroom in Wadena. The Wadena class teaches many of the same topics as we do in Moorhead. My colleague in Wadena is knowledgeable in VOIP. I've been trying to develop ideas for our students to use the link to gain experiences that are difficult to gain any other way. I am asking for suggestions.

I appreciate your time to read this and any comments you might send.

Our next advisory meeting would be in the February/March 2012 time frame. Well, at least that is how it looks from this point in time.

 

 

Tim

 

 

--  _________________ Tim Preuss Information Technology Instructor 1900 28th Ave South Moorhead, MN 56560 tim.preuss@minnesota.edu www.minnesota.edu 218-299-6614 One College. Four Campuses. Online.


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