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Chapter 1: Requirements for a Linux System Administrator
Together with our readers, editors, and reviewers, we hope we’ve decreased entropy
slightly in this little corner of the computing world.
Who Needs You?
A few years ago, most Linux system administrators would have told you that they
didn’t choose their careers—Linux chose them. In the old days, Linux was like an
adolescent Unix. Most Linux system administrators learned the ropes on single
workstations and very small networks. Linux inherited some servers from Unix
(BIND, Sendmail, Apache), but little office software and few applications. Today,
Linux system administration involves thousands of packages and interoperability
with other operating systems.
Who needs Linux administrators? The NASA Center for Computational Sciences
(NCCS) at the Goddard Space Flight Center does. Its Linux-based high-performance
computing (HPC) clusters are designed to dramatically increase throughput for appli-
cations ranging from studying weather and climate variability to simulating astrophysi-
cal phenomena. Linux supplements NCCS architecture designed to scale to as many as
40 trillion floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS) in its full configuration.
Linux runs more of the world’s top supercomputers than any other operating sys-
tem. In fact, as of this writing Linux runs an astonishing 75 percent of the top 500
supercomputers on the planet.
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According ...