[geeks] Admin priorities

[Jonathan Katz]

Kevin wrote:
> What do you think for the following priorities I have put together?

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Do you have any SLAs
with your user commuity? Depeartmental chargebacks? If not, you may
want to develop a priority framework around that eventuality so
sysadmins won't have to relearn priorities if that ever occurs. It all
rests on the size of the organization. I'd see the priorities similarly
to yours, but a lot of tasks need to be in parallel (both pro and
re-active sysadmin.) The *best* sysadmin job I had was at cadence.com
where 50% of the time was taking 3rd-level helpdesk tickets and the
other 50% of the time was dedicated to being proactive (capacity
planning, sizing, new server builds, etc.)

I see priorities as:

1) Emergency reactive. (fighting fires, fixing things-- disk crash,
etc.) This should be a top priority, but it shouldn't happen often.

2) Reactive. (whining users "I can't get my mail!")

3) Routine Maintance. This used to be cleaning the heads on RM80
drives. Now it means doing monthly runs of patchdiag and quarterly
patching of high-availability production servers. It also means
defragging disks once a month for NT servers, cleaning out mail queues
weekly, locking older accounts, etc. Doing this stuff on a schedule
means things like #1 occur *less*. This includes patching for bugfixes
and upgrades for bugfixes.

4) Enhancing services. We're IT-- we're here to put technology in place
that lets people do their day-to-day job more efficiently. No more, no
less. If we can build bigger/better/faster systems or find ways to fix
systems to be faster/save-time -- that's part of our job. Part of this
is being pro-active about patches as mentioned in #3, but this means
watching performance stats (keep sar running, etc) and watching trends
and ordering more RAM/processors BEFORE users notice performance
issues. It means enabling UFS logging on your Solaris 7 and 8 boxes.
This includes patching for added functionality (PERL 5.6 or 5.7 when
its ready because it has threading.)

That's just the way I see it.

-Jon

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