Unrealistic Job Requirements

It’s time for a rant. My friend had a phone interview recently and the guy asked him if he knew how to script. A very reasonable question and my friend said yes and yada yada yada the interview goes on and he asks questions about scripting, not bad, until he tells my friend “we are looking for people with at least 18 years of experience”. That’s when I tell my friend, “what the heck?”. The guy had seen the resume before the interview and knew how old my friend would be, 28 to be specific.  So I say, “in order for you to have 18 years of experience you would have to be scripting since you were 10 years old”.

If it were me, I would want to scream at the guy and hang up, whether I’d do it or not is another question. I say if you have been scripting for five years you have pretty darn good experience and know your stuff.

<end of rant>

 

Fun At Work

Work is not always this adventurous but I am not complaining. Today I encountered something that I thought was really funny. There are 300+ UNIX servers here that we have to take care of and the time on all of them is local. Yea right! that is what I thought. I was on a server today that appeared to have the wrong time. Obviously I haven’t encountered this before because the time is kept up-to-date using cron. The time was suppose to be in GMT on this server but I changed it to CDT without noticing. The other administrator comes to me and says

“did you change the time on this server?”
“Yes, the time was messed-up”
“…Time on this server is in GMT”
“$*&$@%..”

You would think that changing the system time wouldn’t do much harm, but some of these servers are running mission critical applications.

 

AIX Quirk

No OS is without its quirks. I had to struggle on and off for a couple of hours to get TCP/IP up and running on an AIX system to no avail until I figured out the problem was nowhere near where I thought it would be; such is life. The much user-friendly smitty didn’t help either, it would give me an odd error every time I tried to bring up TCP/IP:

A nameserver already exists

Needless to say, I have never seen this issue before. After much head banging against the monitor and smashing the keys on the keyboard, I felt a light bulb lit on top of my head. I thought to myself “What If..”. To much surprise my hunch was right; smitty was trying to write the new nameserver IP address to the file /etc/resolv.conf, which already existed there. The command executed flawlessly after manually removing the existing line from the file. From the error above it seems like smitty is trying to create a nameserver, which kept throwing me off.

Do you have any UNIX oddities to share? Feel free to comment.