99.99 of sysadmin'ing comes from experience
Right
Two OSL staff have created and taught a system admin course at OSU: http://cs312.osuosl.org/ The content is available under Creative Commons.
We're actively working with the EECS faculty to incorporate both system administration and open source topics into the course offerings.
I beg to differ. I've been a sysadmin for 15 years. The professionalism and quality of the work done by the students here at the OSL is quite often indistinguishable from many of the people I've worked with over the years. Many of the people working on our hosted projects can't tell whether they're working with our professional staff or student workers.
We teach them to be sysadmins. They may not be sysadmins when they come to us, but they sure as hell are professional sysadmins when they leave.
I work for the OSU OSL.
Actually, we're more than a mirror. While mirroring is a major part of the services we provide, we also provide hosting for many projects' core infrastructure - Apache, Linux Foundation, Drupal, kernel.org, etc. Google is a major supporter of the OSL because we provide a place for projects whose needs have outgrown the more "off-the-shelf" structured hosting provided by Google Code or Sourceforge and need a more customizable environment.
As to the single point of failure concern - I disagree for several reasons:
It would take something more than a "pissed off dean" to summarily shut the OSL down.
-Greg
We are experiencing system trouble -- do not adjust your terminal.