[techtalk] system administration responsibilities question

[Raven Alder]

Heya --

Quoth Yvonne:
> If you are the system administrator over a (web) server, do you
> administer all the services on that box? Including databases?

     If you have root, you often end up adminning other services, even
if they are not supposed to be your responsibility.  Delegating who is
supposed to be responsible for what is often based on skillsets, etc.,
but it's good to have more than one person able to do each task.  It
saves you when the person who's supposed to be the NT admin is nowhere
to be found, and the server is down.  [grin]

     There's nothing wrong with having different people responsible for
each service on the box, and IME that is the usual setup.  But it's a
good idea to make it cooperative, with slightly fuzzy boundaries and
one source of logging.  That way, if Bob isn't available to make a new
mail account, Jane can.  But she'll write it down somewhere so that Bob
will know she did it.

     This even happens spontaneously sometimes.  There's a box that I
admin jointly with two other folks, and it's quite common for us to go,
"Um, here's what I think is the problem, but you know more about qmail
than I do", or "Hey, you're the DNS expert, what happens in this
situation?".  It's awesome, though, because the less experienced people
in each area get to benefit from the experience of the others.

> he is thinking of delegating responsibilities across the servers to
> four of us... a "web admin", Unix admin, NT admin, and network
support
> person 

     Not unreasonable, as long as you're not too rigid about it. 
"Don't touch that!  That's a network issue!"  "No, it's a Unix issue!" 
"Will somebody please just give the damn machine an IP address?"  There
ought to be overlap that both people can handle.

> his words were, he wants the services divided into "discrete parts to
> be allocated to individuals."  Is this the way it's done in the "real
> world?"

     Aaah, manager-speak!  That is often the way that it's done, but
it's by no means the only way to do it, or necessarily the best way to
do it.

> I was hired on as the administrator of two NT web servers, then we
> switched to Linux, the guy who hired me left, the new boss thought I
> was only doing the web part of administration, and gave the system
> administration over to the Unix admin. I'm left with very little
> system administration, really, none to speak of...Now my boss is
> looking for some other service to turn over to me, rather than one
> box.  It's a little frustrating, since I want to do system
> administration, and I'm not getting the experience...

     Okay, so take whatever service that your boss assigns you, but
suggest to them that it would be a good idea "for redundancy and
meeting immediate support needs" to have more than one person able to
do each task.  Make a webpage or get a ticket tracking system so that
you know when others have made changes in "your" area.  And then
apprentice yourself to the person who's doing what you want to be doing
as secondary support, whether that's the NT admin, Unix admin, network
admin, or any combination thereof.  

     That way you'll get to do some sysadmin, and you'll learn and
benefit from the person or people who have been doing it longer than
you.  It will also make you look really good to your boss if you're
thinking of ideas that will improve your department, and fixing
problems when they would otherwise have to wait.

Cheers,
Raven

=====
"At times it would tear out whole chapters from books
 Or put roomfuls of pictures askew on their hooks."
 -- "The Doubtful Guest", Edward Gorey

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