"Why, in the Linux world should it matter if I have experience with CentOS instead of Unbreakable?"<p>I think it should matter to employers. No doubt you could learn OEL very quickly but I'm sure it has a bunch of little oddities and quirks that could make the day-to-day administration and troubleshooting more difficult for someone without practical OEL experience. From the employer's stand point if they can find someone who knows PAC & OEL inside-out why would they take any chances? It may reflect the job market more than your skill set or the company policies on recruitment. It's <i>very</i> likely they can find a candidate who meets their exact requirements. (Personally I would have just lied and spent the next couple of days learning OEL inside-out to back up my lies)
Yes and No. In my opinion, it's more a reflection of the culture of the shop in which it is used than the specifics of a distribution.<p>A good admin should be able to get up to speed on any distro within a few days and should be able to wrangle BSDs and other more exotic flavours of unix derived OS's easily.<p>What really matters is the history of the shop and the systems and the culture which has grown up around them. Any distro can be badly managed. If you're logging in to the servers using a VNC session as root, you're doing it wrong, no matter what distro is supporting you.<p>Being an admin at an established shop does entail a certain amount of putting up with decisions that were implemented before you showed up. What matters is if you are going to have the authority that goes with the responsibility that your are being asked to take on. If the expectation is that you will keep a patched together system on the air it matters a lot whether you are expected to replace it and manage the transition to a new infrastructure with grace and aplomb; or if you're being asked to be the janitor in a lunatic asylum where all the devs have root on the production machines and you'll only find out about changes when the system breaks...<p>The first is a professional challenge, the latter is a path to madness.
It really ought to matter. You take someone with quite a bit of experience in just RHEL or CentOS, and you hire them to work on Ubuntu Server LTS? They'd probably figure it out, but you'd probably have been better off finding someone with less overall Linux experience that is competent with Ubuntu Server or any other Debian-family distro.<p>Fortunately, there's a relatively small core of distros used in the enterprise -- at least when compared to the vast array of all distros under development.<p>I'd think a "Linux sysadmin" worth their salt would be a student of the main families of distros, but competency in the relevant distro should matter when it comes time to hire. Of course, a rockstar sysadmin would know most linux distros, plus some other not-Linux OSes (any or all of Windows, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, *BSDs and the list keeps going)
If they're specifically looking for someone who needs to hit the ground running almost immediately doing work tightly connected to package management, automated updates, or relations with the vendor, then yes.<p>I could only see that being the case for short-term contract work.
From the submission title: "Does the distro matter when applying for a job as a Linux admin?" Yes. Almost certainly some clueless people will care whether you've specifically used their flavor of Linux.<p>From the article title: "Does the distro matter?" No. The differences among Linux distros is so slight that any otherwise qualified/competent admin can be expected to easily learn everything important in days or weeks.
I'd be looking for an admin that is aware of the major distros and knows the strengths and weaknesses of each. Learning the differences in a new one is straightforward, but being the kind of person to actively investigate the bigger picture is far more valuable.
there are just two things remains: apt-cache search/apt-get install and yum search/install =) If you know rpmbuild --rebuld or dpkg-buildpackage you're enlightened guru. If you were realized that it is possible to rebuild Fedora's .src.rpm on CentOS you could be compared to Krishna himself. =)<p>btw, Someone still hiring "Linux admins"? I can do it for free. =)