what does a system administrator do?

[Christopher Browne]

On 4/21/05, Franco Saliola <saliola-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Hello there everyone.
> 
> In September I took over a part-time system administrator position for
> small university computer lab. It has about 20 computers. They're all
> linux machines, running RedHat Enterprise Linux. The position is
> supposed to be the equivalent of a teaching-assistantship (10-15 hours
> per week) at the university (I'm a graduate student and avoiding
> freshman by administering). I basically got the job because no one
> else wanted it (and because I have some linux experience).
> 
> Besides a near hard drive failure on the mail/http server, there have
> not been many problems. In fact, this job has required very little of
> me, most of my time is spent helping users with specific problems (How
> do I listen to CBC radio online? How do I set environment variables?
> How do I print single-sided?) So I'm wondering if I'm doing something
> wrong. So here is the question.
> 
> What should a system administrator be doing? Or what is expected of a
> system administrator?
> 
> Do you have any suggestions for resources for a good administrator
> book (with an emphasize on security preferably)?
> 

A book that I recently got in at work that does a pretty good job of
providing an overview is Mark Burgess' book, _Principles of Network
and System Administration_.

It has a fairly "principled" perspective, presenting both suggested
rules, as well as why it came up with them (so that you know the
degree to which you might not want to believe in them ;-)).

The author is also the author of the "cfengine" system configuration
tool, and presents some material on how to use it.

I was a little disappointed in it not being filled with cfengine
recipes for managing all the things it suggested needed managing, but
there you go :-).
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