motd istrators, or some other sort of administrator who looks upon by Rob Kolstad “system administrators” as “someone else.”Sometimes, they view Rob Kolstad is cur- sysadmins as a sort of inferior species, which is also surprising to rently Executive Director of SAGE, the me. Apparently, specialization has some sort of value that I don’t System Administra- understand very well (and, since I don’t work in a large com- tors Guild. Rob has edited ;login: for pany, I’m going to have to work extra hard to learn more about over ten years. this particular phenomenon). At any rate, none of SAGE’s messages gets through to these other [email protected] administrators since they’re not tuned to “system administra- tion” information. One email conversation I had was very illu- minating in that my correspondent simply could not hear SAGE: Approaching the “generic administrator” when filling out a form. If a question did not specifically address “network administrator,”then he/she Crossroads simply could not answer it. This puzzled me greatly. I’ve now been in the SAGE directorship position for a year. Here I subsequently urged many in our community to create an are a few words on some of the interesting challenges I’ve umbrella term that could be used to refer to the collective of all encountered. sorts of system administrators. Many great suggestions have A summary of the job is in order, of course. SAGE’s goal is “To emerged, but none of them seems perfect, yet. Often, the prob- advance the profession of system administration.”To that end, lem I’m talking about is misunderstood or denied. This is very the professionalization of system administration is often cited as strange to me. a corollary. Paul Evans started the professionalization movement Another of the other biggest challenges I’m now facing is that many years ago when he pointed out that professions have com- joining SAGE isn’t very simple. To that end, I’ll be lobbying mon properties: strongly at the USENIX Board of Directors meeting in San Antonio to create a simple and extremely affordable fee struc- I A book of knowledge ture for joining SAGE. Wish me luck. My goal: a click on a web- I A university degree program site and a small amount of money gets you a shiny membership I A certification program of some sort card and all the rights and privileges of SAGE membership. I Conferences/gatherings I A code of ethics Our industry’s economic slowdown has resulted in reduced I Professional journals/publications SAGE staffing so my personal response time for many issues I Recognition programs for outstanding contributors continues to worsen. I have never been so far behind on email or on my to-do list as I am today. SAGE is moving down the road to creating all these various properties, which is good. Best of all, public recognition for the To that end, I am soliciting volunteers to assist with some spe- career of system administration is high and growing. It appears cific SAGE projects. Here’s the first three: that high school students all know of such things. I Completing the paradigm for creating and maintaining I think there are about 750,000 syadmins in the USA (and an SAGE-affiliated organizations both in the USA and around additional substantial fraction of that many throughout the rest the world. of the world). This means that the odds of having one as a I Submitting white papers for the SAGE Web site neighbor are fairly high. The profession’s recognition is making I Repairing and implementing various functions on the progress. SAGE site. Some barriers to organizational success, though, have come as a These positions are neither “advisory” nor “personnel manage- surprise to me. ment”.They are roll-your-sleeves-up and make results happen One of the most jarring recent events was the realization that positions. I’ll endeavor to insure that obstacles are removed – many of our prospective members have very committed ideas but the organization really needs a bit more manpower right about what a “system administrator” is (and thus what the audi- now. If you’re interested, please email me and let me know of ence for SAGE is) – and SAGE isn’t on their radar. your interest. Often, these people are network administrators, security admin- I think that the field of system administration (and all the sub- 2 Vol. 28, No. 3 ;login: fields that, in my mind, it contains: network admin, security admin, database admin, LAN admin, etc.) is not only technically fascinating but one of the highest-leverage fields of endeavor. I’d really like our organization to be the premier technical associa- tion for the hundreds of thousands of administrators (of all sorts of systems – SAGE is EDITORIAL STAFF not parochial about this). If you have suggestions or ideas, please do forward them to EDITOR: me. Finances and timing combine to make 2003 the year that we must all succeed on Rob Kolstad [email protected] this task. Any assistance is appreciated! CONTRIBUTING EDITOR: Tina Darmohray [email protected] MANAGING EDITOR: Alain Hénon [email protected] COPY EDITOR: Steve Gilmartin TYPESETTER: Festina Lente MEMBERSHIP, PUBLICATIONS, AND CONFERENCES USENIX Association ✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐ 2560 Ninth Street, Suite 215 Berkeley, CA 94710 Phone: 510 528 8649 First Haiku Contest FAX: 510 548 5738 Let’s write some Haiku. You’ve probably seen Haiku, little three line poems with five Email: [email protected] syllables in the first line, seven in the second line, and five more in the last line. Syllabic [email protected] [email protected] stresses (accents) are not important. Here’s a quick one: WWW: http://www.usenix.org Surfing excitement http://www.sage.org No response to any site Sadness rules the night The brief Haiku captures a thought, a moment, a scene, or a vision. The best Haiku amplify insight or even cause an “Aha!” or epiphany. Many Haiku traditionally describe the seasons of the year. Being a technical society, this doesn’t seem quite so germane to our mutual interests. This first Haiku contest solicits your entries describing some state of the Internet. Many entries will be posted on the web-site and potentially printed in these pages. The winning entry will be highlighted and rewarded: its author will be win a handsome polo shirt commemorating his/her vision and creative writing ability. Details: Please submit entries to [email protected] with the subject line “Haiku — internet”. Entry deadline: July 1, 2003. No limit on entries (other than pragmatism). Anonymous entries win no physical prizes. Void where prohibited by law. ✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐✐ June 2003 ;login: 3 Microsoft: what’s next? Microsoft just won their years-long antitrust lawsuit: they flouted the law, by Kragen Sitaker they perjured themselves with impunity, and they got off with a slap on the Kragen Sitaker is a multilingual hacker wrist. who's used UNIX since 1992, presently The time has come for those of us in the free-software community to think about consulting on server- what this means, because now Microsoft considers us Microsoft Enemy #1. What side Web software development in San should we expect in the next few years? Francisco. See http://pobox.com/ I don’t think my writing this will help Microsoft much – they’ve probably already ~kragen/ for more. thought this stuff through quite thoroughly – but perhaps it will help the rest of the world. [email protected] Well, we can probably kiss Microsoft Office on Linux goodbye. It works now – at least, up to Office 97 – but Microsoft will do everything in their power to ensure that future versions of Office don’t run on Linux, or, for that matter, on old versions of Microsoft Windows. In the past, they’ve licensed some products only for Microsoft operating systems. Antitrust law forbids this, but they might not care – they just laughed in the face of an antitrust case from the world’s most powerful government and won. In any case, they can certainly legally use technical means to make them difficult to run. For example, they can integrate big chunks of application code into the operating sys- tem; running the applications on another operating system would then require that the other operating system include re-implementations of all of this application func- tionality. Taken to the logical extreme, this would mean including all Microsoft appli- cations with every copy of the OS, only encrypted or disabled in some other way; the application CDs would merely contain activation keys. This would make it harder to upgrade the applications independently of the operating system, but it seems likely that Microsoft can use their “critical update notification tool” to distribute the neces- sary updates ahead of the application releases. Strategic GPL applications on Microsoft Windows could become technically very diffi- cult to run, especially when Microsoft can upgrade everybody’s operating system to break them on a daily basis. Microsoft, of course, has no legal obligation to verify that their software updates don’t break third-party applications. Along similar lines, Microsoft Windows licensing might forbid linking GPL applica- tions to system libraries, on the grounds that it might imperil Microsoft’s intellectual property. The Windows XP license forbids providing remote access to your desktop and, if I recall correctly, uses various technical means to make this difficult. These technical means won’t work when the Microsoft Windows OS runs inside a virtual machine like VMware. So Microsoft could “legitimately” break VMware compatibility, and probably will. (Microsoft can break VMware compatibility easily, especially when they can update their software on a monthly basis.) Microsoft has filed for a number of strategic patents on the .NET virtual machine.