@scottalanmiller said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@EddieJennings said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@scottalanmiller said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@EddieJennings said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@scottalanmiller said in Topics of Systems Administration:
I agree that broader concepts matter. But is an SA book a good place to teach network protocols? Should a networking book or an email book do that instead?
I'm sure this will get a laugh from you, but I don't recall any of my CCNA books (even the networking fundamentals) mentioning DNS, SMTP, and other network protocols. 
I'm pretty sure that they do, lol. The Net+ definitely does. That's where that stuff really goes, definitely not in a systems book.
It would be super high level of course. Digging into SMTP makes no sense until you are a deep email expert. Even full time email admins rarely know much about SMTP beyond the very basics. For other roles to know much would be unproductive. Knowing that it's the protocol of email is really enough.
I will admit a bit of bias in my feeling of the importance of needing to know a bit about SMTP as my last two jobs have ended with me being the primary (in one case, only) E-mail administrator 
I have a similar, but opposite bias. Back in the 90s I read like every major book on SA you can imagine. They all covered pretty much the same stuff. And then, in a career where I've worked in everything from SMB to three Fortune 10s, in academia, have taught both university and professional classes (I was the SA teacher for IBM and Lockheed), have overseen hundreds of high price admins.... never once in decades of experience have I encountered any role that in any way resembled what every book and reference touted as "what SAs do."
They all seem to have worked in a tiny subsection of 1980s or 1990s SMBs, done just one or two essentially similar tasks, and just assumed that the entire field was what they saw without the slightest general experience. I assume that somewhere there was a professor who never managed to get a job in the field and a number of their students kept regurgitating the same false info.
And it would vary from minor (they all taught Sendmail, but Postfix is what almost all real world deployments were) to major (they all taught GUIs and printers, but find a UNIX shop that uses either, anywhere.) And it was giant percentages of the books, like 60-80%, focused on tasks I've never seen anywhere, in any industry, at any size, at any point in time - and almost all are ones I couldn't imagine having any scale.
And, of course, it all comes at the expense of learning the basics and actual material. I assume because it's easy to teach Sendmail basics and hard to teach real SA concepts. One is just copying common commands, the other is explaining difficult ideas. It has felt like they've always been a crutch, a way to cheap out on teaching what matters but make books long and daunting with little effort.
How did you teach classes for Lockheed when you only worked there for a week?
