Chapter 1. The Philosophy of System Administration

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1.3.3. Tell Your Users What You Have Done

After you have finished making the changes, you must tell your users what you have done. Again, this

should be a summary of the previous messages (invariably someone will not have read them).

However, there is one important addition that you must make. It is vital that you give your users the

current status. Did the upgrade not go as smoothly as planned? Was the new storage server only able

to serve the systems in Engineering, and not in Finance? These types of issues must be addressed here.

Of course, if the current status differs from what you communicated previously, you should make this

point clear, and describe what will be done (if anything) to arrive at the final solution.

In our hypothetical situation, the downtime had some problems. The new CPU module did not work;

a call to the system's manufacturer revealed that a special version of the module is required for in the 

field upgrades. On the plus side, the migration of the database to the RAID volume went well (even

though it took a bit longer than planned due to the problems with the CPU module.

Here is one possible announcement:

System Downtime Complete

The system downtime scheduled for Friday night (please see the System Administration page on the com 

pany intranet website) has been completed. Unfortunately, hardware issues prevented one of the tasks from

being completed. Due to this, the remaining tasks took longer than the originally scheduled four hours.

Instead, all systems were back in production by midnight (6am Saturday for the Berlin office).

Because of the remaining hardware issues, performance of the AP, AR, and the Balance Sheet report will

be slightly improved, but not to the extent originally planned. A second downtime will be announced and

scheduled as soon as the issues that prevented completion of the task have been resolved.

Please note that the downtime did change some database indices; people that have written their own SQL

queries should consult the Finance page on the company intranet website. Please contact System Adminis 

tration at extension 4321 with any questions.

With this kind of information, your users will have sufficient background knowledge to continue their

work, and to understand how the changes will impact them.

1.4. Know Your Resources

System administration is mostly a matter of balancing available resources against the people and

programs that use those resources. Therefore, your career as a system administrator will be a short

and stress filled one unless you fully understand the resources you have at your disposal.

Some of the resources are ones that seem pretty obvious:

System resources, such as available processing power, memory, and disk space

Network bandwidth

Available money from the IT budget

But some may not be so obvious:

The services of operations personnel, other admins, or even an administrative assistant

Time (often of critical importance when the time involves things such as the amount of time during

which system backups may take place)

Knowledge (whether it is stored in books, system documentation, or the brain of a person that has

worked at the company for the past twenty years)