8.1 - Commentary

Abstract

This chapter presents a brief commentary on the nature of professionalism and the social issues related to it. In many ways a Network and System Administrator profession is analogous to the medical profession, with its ability to look deep inside peoples' most private places and make life or death decisions about the plumbing. For a couple of decades now, the profession of system administrators has been seeking to consolidate its identity and define its role, even as the technological and social landscape has changed. It is natural that this has led to the formation of organizations and interest groups, both local and global, who discuss these matters at length. These organizations have not been without controversies. Indeed, the question of whether system administration is a discipline is still posed every year. Professional organizations that have been responsible for the open environment of especially Unix system administration have been discussed. In addition to these, there are many industry-academic interest groups such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the Tele-Management Forum (TMF), and the Network Management Research Group (NMRG).