WYNTK: UNIX System Admininistrator

Chapter 1. What you need to know about solving problems

There’s no magic involved.

So you’re in the office alone at 10PM, and there’s no administrator to be found. Or you’re in your office at 11 AM, and your administrator isn’t responding to your email. Or you don’t think your problem is important enough to bother the administrator.

Many problems that users have on UNIX systems don’t really require the system administrator. A lot of the time, all you need is someone who knows the system a little better than you do. And in fact, a lot of the time that person could be you; it’s just a matter of learning your way around the neighborhood.

Many users think that UNIX is some mystical land that only the technically worthy may enter. UNIX certainly tries to build itself up that way. Commands are called bizarre things like grep and awk. People finger and ping each other, and experts call themselves “gurus.” A famous poster shows a conjurer stirring a swirl of potions with magical words like perl, biff, emacs, and troff. UNIX people have this annoying way of pronouncing things in unintuitive ways (such as TeX and vi), perhaps so they can tell the Outsiders from the people “in-the-know.”

The truth is, there is no magic. The computer is merely a computer, and it’s not that complicated. It’s just that UNIX was made for the tinkerer, not for the user.

What was your first impression of UNIX?

	Fear and loathing. I now think of UNIX as having the personality of an eccentric aunt. I’m not always sure whether to be afraid or intrigued.
	--Rebecca Kondos

Whenever your administrator or other experienced user helps you with a problem, it always looks like unintelligible commands fly out of their fingers, and that you’ll never be able to understand what they do. That’s not true. Yes, experienced users know a lot of shortcuts that make their work hard to follow, but the actual skills they use are just common sense and a bit of knowledge. You probably already have a bit of the former, and the latter is pretty easy to learn once you set your mind to it.

Moving to UNIX from a PC

	If you have used DOS much from the command line, you don’t need to be afraid of UNIX. DOS and UNIX are similar—like speaking Spanish and Italian. In DOS there’s dir; in UNIX there’s ls. In DOS there’s more; in UNIX there’s more. In DOS there’s type; in UNIX there’s cat (for concatenate). A few of the commands are the same. Many more commands have different names, but what the commands do are identical or very similar.
	--Dick Peck