Three Fundamental Rules for Every System Administrators

Posted on November 17, 2011. Filed under: Mics, Tutorials, Useful Tips and Tweaks | Tags: useful, Useful Tips and Tweaks |

Rule # 1: – Backup Everything

Every system admin knows very well his production environment may crash someday, it doesn’t matter how! So the way to be prepared for that situation is to have a valid backup.

If you don’t have backup planned, you should planned immediately. While planning for a backup, keep the following factors in your mind –

What software (or custom script?) you would use to take a backup?
Do you have enough disk space to keep the backup?
How often would you rotate the backups?
Apart from full-backup, do you also need regular incremental-backup?
How would you execute your backup? i.e. using crontab or some other schedulers?

Imagine that Sam takes backup of the critical applications regularly, but doesn’t validate his backup. However, Jack doesn’t even bother to take any backup of his critical applications. It might sound like Sam who has a backup is in much better shape than Jack who doesn’t even have a backup. In my opinion, both Sam and Jack are in the same situation, as Sam never validated his backup to make sure it can be restored when there is a disaster.

Rule # 2: – Become master in command line and avoid using GUI – if possible

If you are a Linux system administrator, you should master the command line. There is not a single task on a UNIX / Linux server that you cannot perform from command line. While there are some user interfaces available to make some of the system administrator task easy, you really don’t need them and should be using command line all the time.

On any system, if you want to be very fluent and productive, you should master the command line. The main difference between a Windows system administrator and Linux system administrator is — GUI Vs Command line. Windows system administrators are not very comfortable with command line. Linux system administrator should be very comfortable with command line.

Even when you have a UI to do certain task, you should still prefer command line, as you would understand how a particular service works, if you do it from the command line. In lot of production server environment, system administrators typically uninstalled all GUI related services and tools.

Rule # 3: – Automate Everything

If you want to be a successful system administrator than you should automate everything and became lazy. Take few minutes to think and list out all the routine tasks that you might do daily, weekly or monthly. Once you have that list, figure out how you can automate those. The best system administrator typically doesn’t like to be busy. He would rather be relaxed and let the system do the job for him.

Lazy system administrators are the best system administrator.

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11 Responses to “Three Fundamental Rules for Every System Administrators”

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Thanks for valuable information

Danish
November 22, 2011

HELLO FRIENDS,

I LIKE THIS POSTING

DEEPAK.

DEEPAK
December 4, 2011

Great Vasim bhai, really its greate but in my scenario they don’t have anything proper even hardware and mixmode exchange 2000 and 2007. No servers failover.
I have many times suggested to impliment atleast new hardware but they don’t want and now its very challenging for me.

Izhar Khan
December 8, 2011