What do system administrators do?

Almost every company employs system administrators. I have noticed that is it not always obvious to everyone what these system admins do all day.

Therefore I created the list below with tasks that system admins usually do in daily practice:

• Installation and maintenance of hardware and software;
• Daily checks of the systems;
• Organising a fast repair of the service in case of an incident or emergency;
• Applying changes based on RFC's;
• Monitoring systems;
• Creating and maintaining scripts;
• Creating and checking daily back-ups;
• On demand restoring of data from back-ups;
• Performance tuning;
• Installing patches;
• Checking the security of systems and keeping it up-to-date;
• Patching systems and firmware;
• User account management;
• Answering second-line technical questions;
• Documenting systems and keeping documentation up-to-date;
• Keeping informed about their professional knowledge.

So, be nice to your system administrators: they are very busy!

This entry was posted on Thursday 27 December 2007