At least up until I left IBM last May, they still issued pagers as standard equipment to any system administrator that worked at an IBM site or outsourced hosting center.

As an 'on site' admin, meaning I worked at the local IBM campus, I had a pager. I asked my manager if I could switch to cell-phone only so I didn't have to carry additional devices around. Here's the reasons he gave for why I would have a pager only.

• Cost. The pager was $25/mo for unlimited messages and the device itself was $50 (I had two the entire 8 years I was there). To get an equivalent cell phone plan, it would cost at least twice that. Multiply that by 20 people per department, or 150 people in the organization. It adds up fast.
• Reception. Pagers get messages in places where cell phones can't. The data centers weren't in some underground bunker, but there was enough interference to prevent most cell phones from getting more than 2 bars (usually none).
• Two-way transmitting devices not allowed. One of the data center policies was actually that a two-way transmitting device could not be brought in because it could cause interference with the equipment already interfering with its signal. Rules is rules.
• Reliability. Others have stated that SMS messages simply don't get received, and while pagers aren't perfect, reliability of getting messages is one of the reasons Doctors carry them (others have commented more reasons too).

The pager providers IBM uses are Arch Wireless and Skytel. Google 'em.

Nowadays I carry a cell phone, I work from home, and I haven't been to a data center since I took this job four months ago.

I just finished reading Jim Collins' book, Good to Great, and Circuit City is one of the companies that went from Good to Great in the timeframe they researched.

That book came out in 2000 or 2001. Since then, Amazon.com has certainly increased their retail markets to more than just books and music. Personally, I bought a lot of my home theater equipment from Amazon, rather than CC simply because the prices were at least 20% better. I went to CC stores to physically compare the products I was planning to buy from Amazon.

With CompUSA's failure, and now Circuit City, I expect Best Buy to fall victim to online retailers.

Someone else pointed this out..

Oooh, what features might those be?

ZFS? How about for Linux, or Mac OS X

DTrace? How about:

$ uname
Darwin
$ which dtrace
/usr/sbin/dtrace
Apparently Linux has no equal, but I've been a Linux sysadmin for many years and didn't have dtrace before, and even now that I have it on my Macbook, I still haven't even learned how to use it, but I understand it can require programming in a C-like language. No thanks. I do programming in Shell, Ruby and Perl, usually in that order. I don't want to relearn C, since I never really liked it to begin with.

ZFS and DTrace aren't compelling reasons to use a particular OS on a workstation (laptop OR desktop) anyway. Userland utility is what uh, users want. Mac OS certainly delivers for both the typical user that wants their browser, IM and music, but they're never going to install Solaris anyway. So your target audience can either pick the "newcomer" who isn't that new, or stick with what they're already using, and use it to get some actual work done, instead of screwing around with other OS's.

On a purely professional level, I don't like Solaris. I supported Solaris systems at a megacorporation for 3.5 years, and the whole time I wished they were Linux. Then my wish came true and I was moved over to a Linux support team when Red Hat was offered to customers we supported. That was 2004 and I haven't looked back. With any luck (and I don't actually believe in luck) I will never use Solaris again.

Maybe this is different for OpenSolaris. I haven't looked since frankly, I don't care. Here's some of the issues I had with it last time I touched a Solaris box (version 9).

• Ridiculous 'native' storage support. The Solstice Disk Suite and Solaris Disk Admin stuff drove me nuts. I wanted to cut myself. Veritas Volume Manager was generally deployed instead, but that wasn't much better.
• Open Source Software + Solaris didn't mix well. It took an inordinate amount of time to get something as simple as an Apache/MySQL setup actually running properly. I'm sure this is better, but it works *perfectly* out of the box on Debian and Red Hat style distributions.
• Patch and package management. This leads to horrors of which I don't have the time to describe. Having the patch management system completely separate from the package management system is nonsensical, and having to download a patch bundle rather than simply install directly over the Internet (see also yum, apt, ports, emerge, etc) makes for a frustrating time administering more than a handful of servers.
• Lack of SSH (particularly, OpenSSH) installed and configured sanely (ie, securely, ie, proto2) by default.

I've used Solaris as a workstation OS, both on Sun and Intel hardware. In my experience of installing it (v2.6 to 9), hardware support is *very* spotty on Intel systems. OpenSolaris might be better, but the rest of the user experience leaves a lot to be desired. Unfortunately for Solaris, Linux wins in the "installs on the most diverse hardware and isn't Windows" area. ZFS and DTrace might be the coolest techs ever, but I have yet to fire up DTrace (work gave me a Mac), and I am not yet compelled to jump on the ZFS will end world hunger bandwagon.

I've been using Linux as a desktop/workstation OS for 14 years. I've tried all sorts of distribution flavors. I've run most of them as file and web servers, workstations and media machiens, firewalls and monitoring systems. I'm at the point now where I've 'been there, done that' to the degree that I really don't want to screw around with the OS when it comes to my workstation. I am fortunate that my company-issued system is a Mac, and I don't have to think about what flavor of the week Unix or Linux variant I'm going to install.

The flavor here is Apple, and I drank all the koolaid.

Here's some very handy commands. I use most, if not all, of these on a regular basis.
$ namei -m /var/log/httpd/error.log
f: /var/log/httpd/error.log
drwxr-xr-x /
drwxr-xr-x var
drwxr-xr-x log
drwxr-xr-x httpd
-rw-r--r-- error.log

Substitute a string in a variable in bash.
$ version="6.4.4-5"
$ echo ${version%%-[0-9]*}
6.4.4

Exclude all the .svn files in a find, and look for a pattern in the results.

find $1 -name '.svn' -prune -o -print | xargs grep -l "$2"

Perl oneliner to convert an epoch to the current date/time.

perl -le 'print scalar(localtime("1223234245"))'

I also started doing a lot of work in Ruby last year after hearing about, and deploying at the company I worked for, a configuration management tool called Puppet. Along with Ruby scripting, I've come to love two excellent tools: rake and capistrano. The quick version, rake is a "make" for Ruby. It will execute shell commands and can do all kinds of awesome. Capistrano was originally written to aid in deploying Rails applications on multiple systems, and has also become a sort of glorified "ssh for loop" since it uses Ruby's Net::SSH class.

Don't set up ssh keys without passphrases unless absolutely necessary*. Use an ssh-agent to store the private keys. There's automated methods for this on every major platform.

• Linux, ssh-agent and ssh-add. The man pages are complete, and automating this is easy in the shell. Alternately GNOME users can use Seahorse to tie the ssh keys into the login keychain.
• Mac OS X, ditto ssh-agent/ssh-add, or use SSHKeychain.app, which will add the keys and passphrase to the login keychain as well.
• Windows, if you're using SSH on Windows, its puTTY, and you should already have the putty agent installed from the installer. You used the installer right?

*Necessary would be for automated application processes that need to ssh to systems without user intervention.

Diff works fine with ssh.

ssh $remote_system cat remotefile | diff - localfile

cat localfile | ssh $remote_system diff - remotefile