Where ever we are and you really have a passion to the system administration field, especially when handling a mission critical production environment, follow/remember the below three points.
1. Backup everything and validate the backup regularly.
Experienced sysadmin knows that production system will crash someday, no matter how proactive we are. The best way to be prepared for that situation is to have a valid backup.
If you don’t have a backup of your critical systems, you should start planning for it 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?
If you don’t have a backup of your critical systems, stop reading this article and get back to work. Start planning for your backup immediately.
2.Master the command line interface[ CLI ].
There is not a single task on a Unix / Linux server, that you cannot perform from command line. While there are some user interface available to make some of the sysadmin task easy, you really don’t need them and should be using command line all the time.
So, if you are a Linux sysadmin, you should master the command line.
On any system, if you want to be very fluent and productive, you should master the command line. The main difference between a Windows sysadmin and Linux sysadmin is — GUI Vs Command line. Windows sysadmin are not very comfortable with command line. Linux sysadmin should be very comfortable with command line.
3. Automate Everything .
Lazy sysadmin is the best sysadmin.
There is not even a single sysadmin that I know of, who likes to break this rule. That might have something to do with the lazy part.
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 sysadmin typically doesn’t like to be busy. He would rather be relaxed and let the system do the job for him.
4. Document Everything You Do.
Doucmentation is the very critical part ,since we all are human and certainly there is a chance for us to messup with something.So document everything !!
1. Backup everything and validate the backup regularly.
Experienced sysadmin knows that production system will crash someday, no matter how proactive we are. The best way to be prepared for that situation is to have a valid backup.
If you don’t have a backup of your critical systems, you should start planning for it 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?
If you don’t have a backup of your critical systems, stop reading this article and get back to work. Start planning for your backup immediately.
2.Master the command line interface[ CLI ].
There is not a single task on a Unix / Linux server, that you cannot perform from command line. While there are some user interface available to make some of the sysadmin task easy, you really don’t need them and should be using command line all the time.
So, if you are a Linux sysadmin, you should master the command line.
On any system, if you want to be very fluent and productive, you should master the command line. The main difference between a Windows sysadmin and Linux sysadmin is — GUI Vs Command line. Windows sysadmin are not very comfortable with command line. Linux sysadmin should be very comfortable with command line.
3. Automate Everything .
Lazy sysadmin is the best sysadmin.
There is not even a single sysadmin that I know of, who likes to break this rule. That might have something to do with the lazy part.
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 sysadmin typically doesn’t like to be busy. He would rather be relaxed and let the system do the job for him.
4. Document Everything You Do.
Doucmentation is the very critical part ,since we all are human and certainly there is a chance for us to messup with something.So document everything !!
