No no, as in second drink of beer. Not second beer :)

[John]

We deal with highly available systems and we have a very good team dynamic so we are somewhat picky but yea, these are some of the questions we ask and some answers we've been given. Mostly in the followup fact to fact interview. A majority don't even get past the simpler phone interview.

What software uses the following common ports: 20/21, 22, 24, 25, 80, 443 or we'd ask the reverse, what port is dns on, tcp or udp? What port is http (we've received 8080 for this one). Worse the followup question is, okay if you don't know what the port is where would you find it? A recent interview had the guy providing Google first then looking it up in his Network+ book.

The biggest issue we have I think is our offices are in North Denver and the Tech Center is in South Denver. So most tech folks are in Castle Rock, Highlands Ranch, Aurora, and around those areas. So commuting would be north through Denver. We do have IBM and Boulder up here so we should get some folks.

I think most admins might either be happy where they are, don't want to deal with the commute, or perhaps are looking at something beyond Unix Administration like VMWare, SAN, and the like.

We've interviewed folks from other states (Washington, Maryland, Ohio, New York) without much luck. We did bring one guy in for a face to face but he failed that (I wasn't in town for that one).

[John]

Or was one. Lots of drinks are not palatable if you don't get into the peer pressure as a kid/young adult. I was a Mormon as a kid so didn't drink coffee, tea, or alcohol (and didn't smoke of course). I'd even avoided caffeinated beverages like Coke and Mountain Dew. As an adult, I encountered coffee, etc while I was in the military and while I was dropping away from the church, none of it had any attraction to me. I tried coffee once when I was in the military and didn't like it (I only had a few drinks of it). I had my first alcoholic drink when I was 47 (10 years ago) and in Athens Greece (Ouzo) and have tried a few different hard drinks since then. Other than Ouzo, everything tastes like medicine. I have also tried different beers in the past 5 or 6 years (like 1 or 2 different beers a year) and found a couple that are palatable (Corona was one). I had a Christmas beer at a local brewery that wasn't bad. It was identified as less bitter. But I find I can only take a single drink of beer in general and it's good but the second drink is hard to get down and I need to hold my breath to get the rest down or just not drink it.

[John]

All the comments here seem to be related to programming but IT is more than just that. We manage over 1,000 servers and can't seem to find a Unix admin in the area that is interested enough in Unix to dig into how things actually work. I mean, if your response to "how do you make a network interface persistent" is "first I click on the menu", we'll likely knock a point or two off. We've had prospective Unix admins admit they're afraid of soft links. We do a lot of scripting so telling me you don't know how to script is likely to knock a point or two off. And it'd be nice if you knew how to disable programs from starting up by understanding how the files are set up in /etc/rc* vs using chkconfig. Sure it works, but we're more than a Linux shop.

[John]

I used a program called Megabasic back in the mid 80's that used paren'd colons to slice up a string.

[John]

There are a couple of problems from our (Operations) perspective.

1. The infrastructure needs to be supported as well. If the various necessary agents (backups, monitoring, application distribution) only work on Red Hat (or CentOS) then Red Hat is what's acceptable in the production environment.

2. The staff needs to be in place to support it. We have three major Operating Systems we support (team of 5 admins). Solaris, HP-UX, and Red Hat/CentOS. With almost 1,100 systems, environments outside our expertise are difficult to manage. Of those 1,100 systems a very very small percentage are Ubuntu (and Suse, Fedora, Mint) and they aren't supported to the level of the primary systems.

[John]

But what about Q?

[John]

Sir, I think you need to step back and take a breath.

Since we haven't exchanged a single word until now, I don't see how I'm being argumentative. I'm asking a simple question.

I would hope any man or anyone would stop it should it be happening in front of them. If I happened to be in a bar (I don't drink so it's unlikely) and saw someone pour a strange chemical into a drink, I hope I would say something.

Depending on the circumstances, I would most likely help a person. But I am also quite wary of scams, having been the victim of a couple (which I escaped with only a loss of money) perpetrated by women.

Certainly I personally am not going to drug a woman's drink.

But I'm already doing this. And I'm reasonably sure a majority of guys are doing this. It sounds like you want us to do something about the guys who are doing this. I'm with you, brother because just you and me and the rest of the guys who aren't doing it, doesn't appear to be fixing the problem since we're still discussing this and there are still rapes.

Is there something more we should or even could be doing? It's an honest question. Should we all wear buttons that say "Don't Rape Other People"?

[John]

As someone who doesn't drink, I've always thought of bars as places to pick up single women or be picked up if you are a woman. A woman is there, dressed up, and presenting herself as available for dating. And guys are there to look for dates. Women bring other women for support or protection. Guys come with other guys to give him the courage to approach a woman. I've never considered it a social gathering place.

That's what I get for not drinking and getting all my information from movies and TV I guess.

Carl

And again I'd like to know how you want to proceed with this. Tell every person we meet "don't rape"? Just tell our friends "don't rape"? How do you propose to enforce zero-tolerance proactively?

[John]

But the police don't prevent rape. They apprehend rapists after the offense. Rape can be pretty traumatic and in some cases is life changing. This needs to be addressed before the Rape happens.

The proposal doesn't seem to be about arresting the perpetrators but in making sure guys don't act when situations arise (so to speak).

And of course, arrests after the fact should already be happening.

[John]

Fine suggestion there. What do you propose for policing our own?

[John]

Seriously? Never heard of the Duke Lacrosse Team that was falsely accused of rape?

[John]

57, and yes. :)

[John]