what does a system administrator do?

[psema4]

> 3. System monitoring.  Occasional checks on server system logs for
> unusual behaviour, error messages and other things.  Utilities like
> logwatch are helpful here.

Early on as an admin, and while I was still learning basic *nix
concepts, I took up learning perl as way to help automate monitoring.

For example, I wrote a couple of very simple scripts that ran basic
command-line commands, reformatted their outputs, and then had them
email the results to me on a daily basis through Cron.  Some of them I
also have producing HTML reports for others in our IT department to
follow up on.  (Eg. disk space usage)

Learning scripting might be a way to eat up some time and still be
constructive.  (Like /. is not???  ;-)

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