Human Errors as a Cause of DNS Failure

[Joseph S D Yao]

On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 02:22:47PM -0500, Michael E. Hanson wrote:
> 
> > How come that a group of admins for an area is so cluless and does
> > such a bad job ad dns admins seems to do. What other group of
> > professionals can get away with a 71.1% error rate ?? ( I certenly
> > don't address the population reading and participating in this group,
> > in my opinion close to everyone who ever posted here has a better
> > ability to manage dns then the "random dns-admin" observed in the study.)
> > I do address the countless junkies that is spreading all this junk
> > ( and filling my logs with "Lame delagations").
> 
> In my experience, because somewhere out there is a bunch of educational
> institutions turning out so-called "experts" who get hired by countless
> thousands of businesses who somehow manage to convince the "powers that be"
> that implementing, configuring, and managing an Internet presence is a task
> best performed by "kids" with little or no experience in Systems/Network
> design/administration simply because the "internet" is such a "new"
> technology that any dinosaur Administrator/Engineer over 36 years of age is
> hopeless to understand it, or that it's so simple it can be managed by the
> VP of Marketing.
> 
> Thank goodness for these "kids", if they weren't out there making a mess out
> of things, I wouldn't have nearly as much work coming my way.  Most of my
> contracts start out as a plea for help to clean up one of these messes.

Would that all such work dried up and went away!!!

The SAGE certification project is doing something, however imperfect,
to have a standard against which system administration education may be
measured.  There is a SYSADM-EDU mailing list trying to figure out how
to better train the next genereation, although unfortunately traffic on
it is very light!  It is always better, IMHO, to have people LEARN how
to do it right, than to come in later and have to bail them out.  This
is apparently not what is taught to the heads of companies, I guess ...

Cricket's original book is fairly thorough, but not as useful to the
person in the third desk who just got told that he has to configure
this DNS stuff because otherwise the main office won't let them connect
directly to the Internet like they want.  The new "cookbook" may have
some more utility for this person.  My only problem is, if I ever write
the one I wanted to, now I have to find a different title.  ;-/

-- 
Joe Yao				jsdy at center.osis.gov - Joseph S. D. Yao
OSIS Center Systems Support					EMT-B
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