Top 10 System Administrator Truths

It had me at #1 – Users Lie.



#1 – Users Lie

Good techies often wont lie about mistakes, thats the one thing I have noticed about techies as opposed to non-techies. A little background: I currently work as a security guard, a usually non-technical job, but since I do it at a high security datacenter for the Worlds Largest Software Company, it gets kinda techinical sometimes, and besides, its a stopgap job. But anyway, when a techie makes a mistake, liek sets off an alarm or gets trapped because they didint swipe their badge, they admit so, and we fix it and move on. But when the non-technical types are around, like the marketing people, or execs from outside datacenter services, they often will try to feign ignorance of the cause of their problems. Of course, this is giving them the benifit of the doubt and assuming that they can figure out what they did wrong.

#3 – Printers Suck

I have accepted this, in my domain, printers are depreciated, hell, even paper is depreciated. Thusly, at home my printer lives in my closet, holding up a stack of Netware 4.11 books.

#4 – Cleanliness is Godliness

Every time a system is brought down for any reason, out comes the canned air. I hate dust with a passion.

#5 – Backups are Crucial

I was annoyed to find that Retrospect isint available for Linux. But then again, Ill prolly stick to xfsdump and scripts.

#7 – No One Ever Got Fired For Buying Microsoft

Unless you work at Novell ;). Sometimes even at Microsoft, its own software isint the right solution.

#9 – Know Your Needs

Even as a firm beliver in Linux I must say that its not the holy-grail of adaptable OSes. But then again, the only Windows server I have is called MCSE, and you can probably guess what its used for.