UNIX System Administration Handbook - Evi Nemeth [485]
Since system administration is a broad field that spans many technical areas and many different vendors’ systems, SAGE is planning to establish multiple certifications. There will probably be a core competency certificate along with supplemental certificates for specialized topics or individual vendors’ systems. It all sounds very similar to the merit badge system used by the Boy Scouts in the United States. A Boy Scout gets a merit badge in wood carving; a sysadmin might get a merit badge in DNS after passing the DNS certification exam. The details of the SAGE program have not been fully worked out, and they will surely have changed by the time you read this. See www.usenix.org/sage for up-to-date information.
Another SAGE activity that’s under development is a mentoring program in which senior sysadmins can mentor folks who are trying to enter the profession and improve their skills. Mentors would typically work one-on-one with their trainees once or twice a week. A more formal educational activity involves the members of the SAGE community who teach university classes in system administration; this group exchanges and shares assignments and teaching ideas via the sysadm-education mailing list. To subscribe, send mail to majordomo@maillist.peak.org and include “subscribe sysadm-education” in the body of your message.
The USENIX and SAGE newsletter ;login: is produced by both organizations; it contains administrative news, tips, reviews, and announcements of interest to sysadmins. SAGE has also produced a series of short, focused booklets that are available for a small fee ($5 for members; ~$10 for nonmembers). New booklets are free if you are a SAGE member when they’re first published. Here is the current list.
• Job Descriptions for System Administrators, edited by Tina Darmohray
• A Guide to Developing Computing Policy Documents, edited by Barbara Dijker
• System Security: A Management Perspective, by David Oppenheimer et al.
• Educating and Training System Administrators: A Survey, by David Kuncicky and Bruce Wynn
• Hiring System Administrators, by Gretchen Philips
• A System Administrator’s Guide to Site Audits, by Geoff Halprin
• System and Network Administration for Higher Reliability, by John Sellens
• The Role of Postmaster, by Rose Chalup[9
]
The last three of these are being published this year (2000), and several more are planned: Effective Customer Support, Monitoring Techniques and Practices, and The Role of Web Master.
SAGE, together with USENIX, its parent organization, puts on the LISA conference each fall and sometimes a network administration conference in the spring. The LISA conference is the biggest, best, most technical, and most focused of the conferences aimed at system and network administrators. It’s held each fall and typically includes three days of tutorials and three days of technical sessions, invited talks, and help sessions. Occasionally, one-day workshops on special topics run in parallel. For information, send mail to conference@usenix.org or see www.usenix.org.
In addition to the original SAGE, several national and regional groups have been formed to help sysadmins interact more regularly with their peers. As of this writing, the national groups are SAGE-AU in Australia; SAGE-WISE in Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and England; and SAGE-PT in Portugal. Contact information for the regional groups can be found at the www.usenix.org/sage/locals.
Mailing lists and web resources
Numerous mailing lists are available to sysadmins of specific systems.
For the Sun Managers list, send mail to majordomo@sunmanagers.ececs.uc.edu; include “subscribe sun-managers” in the body of the message. Archives back to 1991 are available from www.latech.edu/sunman.html; the relevant Usenet news groups