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Habits of the effective system administrator: hints, tricks, techniques, & tools of the trade
Lee Damon
Abstract
We aim to accelerate the experience curve for junior system administrators by teaching them the time honored tricks (and effective coping strategies) that experienced administrators take for granted and which are necessary for successful growth of both the administrator and the site.
The class covers many of the best practices that senior administrators have long incorporated in their work. We will touch on tools you should use, as well as tools you should try to avoid. We will touch on things that come up frequently, as well as those which happen only once or twice a year. We will look at a basic security approach.
We will talk about issues such as why your computers should all agree on what time it is, why root passwords should not be the same on every computer, why backing up every filesystem on every computer is not always a good idea, policiesówhere you want them and where you might want to avoid them - ethical issues, and growth and success as a solo-sysadmin as well as in small, medium, and large teams. We will discuss training, mentoring, and personal growth planning, as well as site planning, budgeting, and logistics. We will discuss books that can help you and your users.
Presenter Biography
Lee Damon has a B.S. in Speech Communication from Oregon State University. He has been a UNIX system administrator since 1985 and has been active in SAGE (US) & LOPSA since treir inceptions. He assisted in developing a mixed AIX/SunOS environment at IBM Watson Research and has developed mixed environments for Gulfstream Aerospace and QUALCOMM. He is currently leading the development effort for the Nikola project at the University of Washington Electrical Engineering department. Among other professional activities, he is a charter member of LOPSA and SAGE and past chair of the SAGE Ethics and Policies working groups, and he was the chair of LISA '04
Who should attend
Junior system administrators with anywhere from little to 3+ years of experience in computer system administration. We will focus on enabling the junior system administrator to "do it right the first time." Some topics will use UNIX-specific tools as examples, but the class is applicable to any sysadmin and any OS. Most of the material covered is "the other 90%" of system administration - things every sysadmin needs to do and to know, but which aren't details of specific technical implementation.