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This is a mirror-image of this question here: https://serverfault.com/questions/4176/what-sysadmin-things-should-every-programmer-know

The original was posted by Nathan DeWitt. Credit should go to him. If you have a serverfault account, please visit his original question and bump it to show appreciation for this inquiry.

To paraphrase Nathan:

As a SysAdmin, we tend to take programmers for granted. The few times I've been without a good programmer have really made me appreciate what you guys do. When we're venturing into an environment without a programmer, what words of wisdom can you offer us?

Community
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Avery Payne
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    I think this should be closed as belongs to serverfault and that should be closed as belongs to stackoverflow, then both should be closed as subjective and argumentative :) – Mehrdad Afshari May 15 '09 at 21:17
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    Hmmm. It's about programming, it's interesting, doesn't seem particularly subjective, although certainly would have a list of possibles. maybe community wiki, but I don't think it should be closed. – Charlie Martin May 15 '09 at 21:19
  • it will be made into a community wiki shortly. I wanted to see "the other side of the fence". – Avery Payne May 15 '09 at 21:22
  • Wow. They really *are* two different communities. The original was well-received at SF and isn't even a wiki. It's been less than 10 minutes and I'm getting negatives. – Avery Payne May 15 '09 at 21:31
  • Converting this to a community wiki. – Avery Payne May 19 '09 at 19:35
  • Will close this wiki 2009-05-23; tempted to add a bounty to see if I can get some more responses. – Avery Payne May 20 '09 at 22:34

4 Answers4

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Programmers need access to internet resources (such as StackOverflow). Don't block our access kthnx.

rein
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I would argue that a system administrator is a kind of programmer. So they should be able to think about programming; use scripting languages effectively, and write clear, well documented programs in them; have some understanding of how a programming project works.

Ideally, they should read up on agile methods, because quick development of small, changeable programs is the usual world they live in. They should understand testing, and if they use a modern scripting language, they should understand unit testing tools, some variant of xUnit.

Charlie Martin
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Sysadmins should know stuff that improves their efficiency.

That includes every feature of the shell they are working in (bash is pretty popular these days). There are many very usefull things in the manual that are worth looking into (from keyboard shortcuts through arrays to regexp).

It is very sad to see a junior sysadmin trying to manually log into 200 servers and switch a line in some file in /etc

If I would recriut an admin, I would demand an advanced (but not expert) knowledge of a programming language. It is not important what language is it, as He can easily switch to something else, but if he hasn't ever coded anything, he will not know how much (precious) time he is wasting manually doing things that can be done with a few lines of code.

Admins tend to like bash, php, python, awk and perl. Any of them will at least tripple their productivity on repetitive tasks.

On the other hand, coders should know httpd and loadbalancer's configuration or they will reinvent the wheel.

Paweł Polewicz
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Perl.

Definitely.

Fortyrunner
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    Agreed. I used to use Perl all the time when I ran a small gaming community. –  May 16 '09 at 12:27