Chapter 1.

The Philosophy of System Administration

Although the specifics of being a system administrator may change from platform to platform, there

are underlying themes that do not. It is these themes that make up the philosophy of system adminis 

tration.

Here are those themes:

Automate everything

Document everything

Communicate as much as possible

Know your resources

Know your users

Know your business

Security cannot be an afterthought

Plan ahead

Expect the unexpected

Let us look at each of these themes in more detail.

1.1. Automate Everything

Most system administrators are outnumbered   either by their users, their systems, or both. In many

cases, automation is the only way to keep up. In general, anything done more than once should be

looked at as a possible candidate for automation.

Here are some commonly automated tasks:

Free disk space checking and reporting

Backups

System performance data collection

User account maintenance (creation, deletion, etc.)

Business specific functions (pushing new data to a Web server, running monthly/quarterly/yearly

reports, etc.)

This list is by no means complete; the functions automated by system administrators are only limited

by an administrator's willingness to write the necessary scripts. In this case, being lazy (and making

the computer do more of the mundane work) is actually a good thing.

Automation also gives your users the extra benefit of greater predictability and consistency of service.

Tip

Keep in mind that if you have a task that should be automated, it is likely that you are not the first to

have that need. Here is where the benefits of open source software really shine   you may be able

to leverage someone else's work to automate the very thing that is currently eating up your time. So

always make sure you search the Web before writing anything more complex than a small Perl script.