[PLUG] Real Men Don't Click

Aaron Burt aaron at bavariati.org
Mon Jun 7 16:21:41 UTC 2010


On Sun, Jun 06, 2010 at 11:01:15AM -0700, Michael Rasmussen wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 05, 2010 at 08:20:48PM -0700, Mike Connors wrote:
> > On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 7:21 PM, Michael Rasmussen <michael at jamhome.us>wrote:
> > > A story of System Administration the *nix way:
> > >    http://isg.ee.ethz.ch/tools/realmen/
> > >
> > > I'd be very interested to see them revisit this and put Powershell (M$
> > answer to shell scripting) to the test.
> 
> The conclusions would be different.  At work I asked about a means to 
> connect with Win servers that is lighter than RDP.  (Telnet is prohibited)

There are decent SSH daemons for Winders these days.

> He reply included mentioning on Win2008 he now has to do some Exchange 
> management via CLI (200 character command lines in his report) instead of
> a few clicks.

Yah.  Leave it to MS to find a way to make a fully-featured command-line
environment (PowerShell) painful to use.  And it's SO SLOOOOW!

Understandable, though, given that *nix has always been CLI, and had to
funcion well that way, and Windows and its "ecosystem" is new to it.

Last time I had to do any significant system automation on Windows, I
fought with PowerShell for a few days, then gave up and decided to use
AutoHotKey and just simulate mouse/keyboard events in the GUI instead.

Learning to automate OS installs and system management are the 2 biggest
bang-for-buck uses for a sysadmin's time, and learning to to it on Windows
as well as on a couple major Linux distros (and maybe BSD or Solaris) is a
ticket to being a *great* sysadmin.

Besides licensing, security and additional hardware expense, the big cost of
running Windows is the additional admin labour.

Unfortunately, it's hard to get paid twice the salary for learning to be as
useful as 2 sysadmins.




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