Theoretical vs Practical Knowledge

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 12 Dec 2001 23:28:55 -0800 
Chuck Yerkes <chuck+baylisa at snew.com> wrote:

> Well, obviously you mount the mailq noatime and you set syslog to
> stop fsyncing (many modern syslogs allow this, sun's doesn't).

Obviously, yes, if you think about it, but the interviewees usually
don't have that luxury.  The purpose of the scenarios is to dump
unknown systems with unknown configurations and histories on the
interviewee and to then watch them grope toward that sort of point.

ObNote: syslog-ng is particularly nice for lowering IO loads as
well, as it allows writes to be written in blocks of
arbitrary/configured size (eg 4K).  As it also allows you to spec
what goes to what file by regex (really!) I've almost come to the
point of refusing to use anything else (minor exception for msyslog
-- a crypting/signing syslog)

> I have a boss now who is infamous to the people to came after him
> for "describe all the options to ls." It's an icebreaker.  When a
> "sr system admin" manages to list 4 and stop then you know s/he's
> faking it.  The sr. people know that it's pretty large.

I'm the sort of guy that would flub that sort of question.  I think
I can name ~6 ls options, recall what most of them do, have my
fingers trained to do the sort of stuff I frequently want to do (eg
-lasp, -1f, -R etc), and leave the rest to the man page.

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.