System Administration

System programmers are the high priests of a low culture - RS Barton

My Papers

• How Many Administrators are Enough?

The following are very, very early drafts of papers I plan to write some day.

• Establishing a Good Production Operations Culture
• Hints for Building and Operating High Quality Services
• Human Side of System Administration
• Challenges Using NT For Production Services
• Rules of Thumb for System Administrators
• Engineers and Management
• “Good Enough” Model and Description of Systems (PPT)

Help / Community

• http://serverfault.com/

Profession, Management, Planning, Process

• USENIX SAGE
• DataMasters (Salary Survey)
• Business Case: Know The Types: Sizing up Support Staffs (copy, was on data.com)
• UCB Information Technology Architecture
• N. Dean Meyer's RoadMap to Fixing Organizations, Structural Cybernetics
• Help Desk Links
• Building Internet Datacenters
• Characteristics of an Operational Interface
• There was a thread on slashdot about How Did You Become a UNIX Administrator which has some useless, and some good suggestions.
• ITPI VisibleOps: Process Improvement & Control
• OGC - ITIL,  ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) and ITSM Directory, ITSM consulting
• COBIT
• Level Descriptions: 8 levels (consider integrating with joelonsoftware ladder)

Research

• Recovery Oriented Computing
• System Administration Research (NOW)
• Principles of System Administration by Mark Burgess
• Current Cites (Digital Library SunSITE)

Cross Platform Issues, Standards, Tools

• My list of Tools for System Management
   
• VNC and TightVNC
• Network Shell and NSH:: Perl Module
• SunWorld - Pursuing Unix and Windows NT coexistence - May 1997
• The UNIX versus NT Organization
• Web-Based Enterprise Management
• Bootstrapping an Infrastructure
• Towards Useful Management
• Tioga - Can it work?
• Mirapoint - IMAP server
• Versions! (Find the latest softwareversions) \
• Comparison of open source configuration management software
• http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.html (2009)
• http://jakeapp.com/ (cross platform sync)

UNIX Resources

• Unix Guru Universe

• USAIL: Unix system administration independent learning
• Unix System Administrator's Resources (Stokeley)
• comp.unix.admin FAQ
• Initial System Crash Dump Analysis (Sun)
• World Wide Web Server Performance (Sun)
• Freeware for Solaris
• Solaris - tuning your TCP-IP stack
• Highly Scalable Mail System
• The Practice of System and Network Administration Website
• recover-data-like-a-forensics-expert-using-an-ubuntu-live-cd

Examples of Support Orginizations

• Computer Systems Lab Home Page

• Automation facilitating system administration, at UCI

Products

• 3ware - Welcome!