Linux Administrators Need to Know PHP
A couple years ago I was doing some work on a client’s web site on a shared hosting environment at a small local ISP and I was setting up some file uploads with PHP and was having problems getting permissions setup and enabling them on the server. I had done it many times before but for some reason just couldn’t get it to work. I resorted to calling the ISP to ask if they had any non-standard setup or configuration on their server that would be causing me problems.
My Own Experiences With System Administrators
I was talking to their system administrator and was asking why I wasn’t able to do any file uploads. He took a few minutes and simply went to PHP.net and found their “handling file uploads in php” document and began reading it to me. I told him I had done it before and had never had any problems, but this was the first time I was trying to do so on their servers. He said to me “I’m just a system admin, I don’t know anything about PHP.” I was kind of shocked. I thought it was pretty important to have at least a basic knowledge of PHP if you’re going to be managing any number of Linux servers that run PHP.
This same thing has happened with another client’s site that has hosting elsewhere from my servers. Anytime their server is upgraded they recompile PHP and forget to enable the GD library. Then the back-end of the client’s site stops working and they contact me for help. After a simple test on the back end I can tell them that the GD library isn’t installed and they need to talk to their system administrator.
One other example was when I had to work on a large web site for a company that hosted their site internally. Their admins had been running Unix servers for years, but when I asked them if they could upgrade to PHP 5 from PHP4 they were really cautious about doing so. It’s not that they had many PHP applications on their server, but more that they were unsure how to do it and wanted to take a couple weeks to learn about what PHP was. That seemed a little odd to me.
Linux System Administrator Job Postings Not Even Requiring PHP
I even see a lot of job postings for Linux/BSD system admins and they don’t mention any requirement to have experience with PHP – sometimes I don’t even see PERL! Of course, it might be assumed to have that knowledge, but when you list things like experience with Sendmail, Apache, MySQL and SSH they should probably be including PHP and PERL in the mix as well.
Why Is It Important?
There probably isn’t much explanation necessary of why PHP should be required skill but when you need to setup PHP modules or be in charge of a server running PHP you need to have a basic understanding of the language. As a system admin, the server security is up to you, and if you aren’t aware of security exploits within PHP or at least know enough to secure your PHP installation – things like register_globals, allow_url_fopen, and magic_quotes – then you’re really not doing your proper research and shouldn’t be installing it on your server.
This goes for any module or program you install on your server. If you are in charge of the server you need to be knowledgeable of everything you put on it, and if you’re going to be setting up PHP, PERL, Sendmail, or an FTP program you need to be aware of their security implications. That’s your job as a system administrator, and it can be really frustrating having to deal with a system admin for a server you’re managing a web site on that can’t even talk to you about configuring the PHP installation because it’s over their head.
