Comments on: 10 Ultimate Rules for Effective System Administration

By: praneeth

praneeth — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 07:30:39 +0000

ramesh
your guidelines are good,the best idea i liked is the automation part you were suggesting ..”automate repititive tasks”

By: Chandrashekar

Chandrashekar — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:01:51 +0000

Hi,
This is a great artical……
Please try to add some more to this with you people experiance…

Thank you
Chandu

By: Adnan

Adnan — Tue, 05 May 2009 07:44:56 +0000

good article & useful tips,Thanks a lot..

By: ahmed

ahmed — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 02:36:20 +0000

great tips , thanks

http://linux-masters.com

By: Cagri Ersen

Cagri Ersen — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 11:34:41 +0000

Great article!
Especially 1., 2., 3. and 7.

and in my opinion, CLI is the way to the illumination.

By: Chim

Chim — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 04:14:40 +0000

And? Does his grammar have anything to do with this argument? No. In fact, it doesn’t matter if English is his first or fiftieth language, his point stands. Saying that EVERYONE should use the command line all the time isn’t smart, nor is it sensible. For some people, GUI’s DO make sense, and they work just as well as command lines. All these edge cases about backup files and crazy crashing scenarios are just dumb.

Oh. and how about commenting on the idea of a post instead of the grammar next time?

By: CyberTech

CyberTech — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 02:11:23 +0000

I’m not sure if English is your second language but, for a blogger especially, I’m amazed at how atrocious your grammar (or possibly proof reading) is.

By: carlos

carlos — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:27:15 +0000

The first rule is “keep it simple”. CLI’s are not simple you need to know exactly what you are doing instead GUIs allow you to move easy tasks to junior sysadmins. In addition when we talk about GUI it is not just X environments it is also web interfaces.

By: Hosting Reviews

Hosting Reviews — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 22:04:05 +0000

backup regularly!!!!! It blows me away the amount of people that simply thing this doesn’t apply to them. Get on it people backup. It can only help! And you’ll be glad you did.

By: jimcooncat

jimcooncat — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:29:49 +0000

1. Get to know and love the little program called “screen”.

2. Organize access to your system. In my shop, that’s openssh (and putty) using public keys.

By: Jason P Sage

Jason P Sage — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:33:22 +0000

I think this article is dead on! :) To bad the old microsoft \”recorder\” wasn\’t better – that would iron out the automation/CLI/GUI issues for the GUI lovers.

I agree about CLI – only because you can stuff it in a text file – and run as a batch or scheduled task – way to go in my opinion for many things.

Great Article!
–Jason

By: CompWhiz

CompWhiz — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:17:29 +0000

As for the GUI tools. Do people really run Xorg on their servers? Sounds like a waste of resources because I do everything on the CLI with ssh. In my experience it seems the CLI configuration tools can be more consistent because most distributions have their own GUI config tools. Using the CLI lets new admins that are used to one distribution to use the new one with less need of learning new tools.

By: Webshop-Winkelen

Webshop-Winkelen — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:17:57 +0000

I totally agree on this! Doing stuff on commandline is much better in my opinion and it also impresses your boss ;-)

By: Ross

Ross — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 08:22:55 +0000

The most important rule that I have seen flaunted by sys admins with little experience is the “Keep it simple” rule.

Don’t implement technologies you don’t need it’s just one more thing to go wrong and if you are going to implement a technology make sure you have an understanding of how it works and plan for it to fail.

By: Rock

Rock — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 06:50:02 +0000

Thank you!
I feel most of the guidelines not only suitable for system administration, but also for software design and development.

By: foo

foo — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 09:20:25 +0000

Dan Martin said:
> Regarding GUI vs CLI: sometimes a GUI is not available.

It is because of these cases why I do most configuration using CLI (even when I’m in X). If anything ever breaks my GUI, I know that I still can operate and possibly recover the system, heck, I can even surf the web on the command line to search for helpful information. And the omnipresence of vi is why I started using vi in the first place. Initially, I didn’t like vi, because it seemed too difficult to use; but now I know I can edit broken configuration files on any system without a GUI.

Forcing admins to use the GUI just adds another layer of complexity and another point of failure to the system.

By: steveee

steveee — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 05:08:40 +0000

Good tips,

For documentation I use elog. It is a great tool.
I have created several log-books, that hold logs, howto, and other documentation. It is web based, fast, allows searching, attachments, and easy categorisation of content. And accessible form any system.

By: Oliver

Oliver — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 02:47:32 +0000

Great tips! Being a relatively new administrator I am really enjoying learning how to make the job easier. I’m glad to see my instincts in documenting everything are good.

Thanks to the people in the comments for the tips as well.

By: RCook

RCook — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 22:54:04 +0000

For documentation I setup a wiki on the intranet. Every time I perform an administrative task I go to the wiki and add an entry for that task. I also place repetitive information such as license keys on the wiki as well, it’s tied into the LDAP directory so security is not an issue and the data is accessible from any PC within the corporate network.

By: JJS

JJS — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:42:01 +0000

Another thing about using a GUI is that there may be configuration meta-files, and directly editing the system configuration files could result in changes being lost when patches are applied. So unless you know exactly what is going on under the covers, stick with the OS’s specific configuration tools.

Later . . . Jim