SANE 2006: A new kind of Administration
Things are changing fast on the Internet, the views on Administration also change in a variety of disciplines. The last two day turned out to be a whole bunch of interesting and very specialized talks. But also they show to me that the actual evolve of administrative tasks is very remarkably. Beside the classical operations a Sysop is doing the whole day, and where the description actually come from. – Administration, but in local sense, regarding the needs and possibilities of a local company or institute. Now things do change, new ways of communication, new kinds of environmental effects are the challenges of modern System Administration. The massive grow of networking habits, interoperability and wide spread technologies access, needs an deep insight view on how things work.
In the old days Administration was on getting things up. By define local conventions and policies on the orga side and a running System on the technical (mostly vendor supported).
In this new days, the capability to thinker into basic technologies gets an very important roll in many ways. To catch up things like the ongoing Internet security nightmares, the ability to plug multi vendor, multi suppliers products in one functional System, with detailed logistic requirements normally only car manufactures can handle.
Ed Felten mentioned in his Keynote speech: “During the last decades System Administration turned from black magic to an own science.”
Things are ticking faster, for many fields and sectors there is no possibility left to get on it at all. Distribution is an important thing to manage the modern challenges, but the distribution has to based on the trust of technicians in there deployed system, not only the one Instance which is in question at a very moment. As we all know the decisions of our design offices and management are not hard linked to the real world…, insert the theory vs. the hard cold world outside debate here. That point is years old, but meanwhile there are so many thing about to emerge that they are not longer strait deterministic. Side effects, dynamics and the always winning entropy make it harder to catch up for people deploying the classic method.
These are my 2 cents on what happens at SANE 2006. I’ve seen so many fluent hackers, with high level interests in there applied technologies and development, these people glue the information stone age, in with we live, together. Here are the Mages of the 21th Century.