Introduction
Managing an Operating System is a common enough task in the IT world. Everyone deals with an Operating System at some level from time to time. This case-study concerns managing operating systems for the effective provision of services. As such we place a heavy emphasis on the ease of administration, security updates and installation.
We'll discuss where we started from, how we came about deciding on our Operating System and procedures and the benifits of the choices we made. But before all that, there are some pre-requisites needed.
Trouble Ticketing
If you do not have a ticket tracking system at the minute then make implementing one a priority. Achieving any of the other targets in this document will be many times harder without one. Plus they are great for documenting how productive you are to managment. Once you have had one for a while you can extract all kinds of useful data about which services/systems consume the most support resources.
rt, bugzilla, fogbugz it doesn't matter, any will do. Post-it notes on your monitor will not!
The Listserv Manuals (over 6cm in width)
Read the Manuals
The documentation provided by your software vendor is one of the greatest weapons in your personal armoury. Spend some time becoming familar with it, read it once or twice before you attempt to deploy the system. Make sure you are aware of all the features your system provides. Many people spend ages fighting against an underperforming system, for example, without ever being aware of the tools available to help tune the system.
If you're using Debian and you've written your own log-rotation script, if you're using
Solaris and you think you need to reboot to apply every change in /etc/system,
if you're using FreeBSD and yoo keep typing ps -ef then you havn't read the
manual.
When something goes wrong you will be better able to resolve the problem if you know the docs, if only in knowing where in the manual to find the what you need.
Corollary: Unfortunately manuals are not always available in the most
convienent form. Documentation can be in surprising places. On one ocasion we were
tearing our hair out trying to make a particular SCSI device show up as /dev/sdc
rather than /dev/sda. After much searching we found a boot argument doumented
in the comments of the linux kernel source. As far as we know, it is documented nowhere else.
Self-tuition, google and mailing lists
Keeping knowledge current is vital. All software is updated perodically, bugs are found, performance-tuning methods are established etc. Only by keeping up with this process can you be able to best manage your systems. Spend time teaching yourself new skills and reading up on new software / hardware.
Subscribe to the mailing list of particular key packages you run, share your knowledge and others will share with you. Subscribe to User Group Mailing lists, get involved with your local one if possible. Make contacts and keep in touch with knowledgable people. It's how we fake it.
Get into the habit of using google, or the search engine of your choice. Being able to search efficiently is a skill. Get a feel for your search engine, read it's manual. If you've never read Google Help Central, now is a good time.
© 2003 Colm MacCárthaigh & Colin Whittaker
