[ON Topic] How 'bout them Linux? Ain't they somethin?!

[Richard Soule]

Paul's email got me thinking... His commment about 'figuring
something out' really hit home because recently I've run into
situations where consultants have 'solved the wrong problem'
for some big clients.

We often see two kinds of 'good' consultants out there:

1) The kind with great experience and thus the ability to
   solve problems that relate to their experience.
2) The kind with great experience AND troubleshooting skills
   and thus the ability to solve problems that relate to their
   experience AND problems they have never seen before.

I've seen situations where consultant type one has put together
the solution to a problem based on their experience but totally
missed the boat when it came to a solution that someone would
really want to use.

I'm not sure if you could really have a class on 'troubleshooting',
but if someone could figure that out it would be VERY valuable.

Something that might be kind of fun would be to 'sort of break'
a linux installation (mis-configure something, 'degrade' a needed
library, etc.) and then have folks 'try to figure it out'. Just
the experience of watching folks go through the various possibilities
and applying their troubleshooting skills could be very interesting.

Rich

Paul Lussier wrote:

>It's the tinkering and debugging that I think hooks most
>of us, so it would be fun to actually do some tinkering and debugging
>rather than just talking about it.  This list has always been rather
>heavy in the sysadmin area, so there are plenty of us who do this stuff
>everyday all day specifically because it's fun *and* they pay us for it.
>Unfortunately, when it's your job, you seldom get the chance to tinker
>on stuff your interested in just because it looks neat.
>  
>