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Future of the Unix Administrator

Hello, I am a student going for my BIT and one of my projects is that i needed to find out what changes to the unix administrator job will occur in the next 10 years. I did a google search and well it wasn't very helpful. I haven't worked with UNIX yet so I really don't have much of a clue about this question. So any suggestion would be very helpful.

thanks
Nynivee

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noonday

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tfewster

The existing trends will continue and the Unix admin role will continue to broaden:
- Direct attached storage (DAS) will be replaced by NAS and SAN storage, which is more flexible but needs managing;
- Integration with Windows servers, e.g. Samba, sendmail;
- Linux & Openoffice on users desktops instead of Windows/MS Office, creating more network traffic, using NFS, NIS+ et;.
- GRID computing, where the workload is run on any available server instead of a dedicated machine - Which needs high-level management.

Generally, more of these tasks will be managed from GUIs instead of the command line.

There's plenty of info on the web about these themes; If you're new to Unix, you'll probably want to start with a list of existing sysadmin tasks - See the Table of Contents of "Essential System Administration" at http://safari.oreilly.com/?XmlId=0-596-00343-9

Good luck with your project; I'd like to see it when its done, as there's probably a lot that I haven't thought about ;-)