[techtalk] system administration responsibilities question

[Kai MacTane]

At 6/6/01 03:39 PM , Yvonne wrote:

>If you are the system administrator over a (web) server, do you administer
>all the services on that box? Including databases? ...
>Is this the way it's done in the "real world?" Or does it vary, according 
>to the size of the company?

IME, it varies according to a variety of things, with the size and 
organization structure of the company (or other organization) being a big 
factor.

In some cases, there's only one person with root access on the machine. In 
that case, regardless of what the organization is on paper, that person is 
the de facto admin for *everything* on the machine. (Unless you have lots 
of stuff tweakable by sudo -- or your permissions are dangerously lax.) In 
other places, each machine will be multi-adminned, with one person 
responsible for, say, DNS, another for mail, another for Web, another for 
database services, and there may even be admins for IRC, NNTP, and other 
services. Other places might have a single admin for each N machines.

>We have maybe 16-20 Linux (mostly) and SCO servers running
>various services. My boss wants me to let him know what services are
>running on our two web servers including apache, samba,
>mysql, etc. and he is thinking of delegating responsibilities across the
>servers to four of us... a "web admin", Unix admin,
>NT admin, and network support person--his words were, he wants the
>services divided into "discrete parts to be allocated
>to individuals."

If you're a Linux and SCO shop, that's do-able. It assumes that each admin 
is sort of specialized (i.e., willing to be a specialist rather than a 
generalist), but otherwise is not at all unusual. I've been at places where 
mail to postmaster, hostmaster, and webmaster all went to different people.

If your company is more of a mixed Unix and NT shop, then that "Web 
administrator" is going to have trouble, because sie will be forced to 
administer servers on two completely different platforms. I suppose if 
you're using Apache on NT, it might make sense to have one person handle 
that -- otherwise, you'll need someone who works on both Apache and 
(Netscape Server, IIS, whatever...). If you have (or are) one person who 
does both, great! Otherwise, the division might need to be more like: Unix 
admin, Unix Web admin, NT admin, NT Web admin, and network support.

>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...

If this is your beef, then regardless of whether what your company is doing 
is standard or not, you might want to talk to your superiors and let them 
know of your dissatisfaction, and then seek a new job if it can't be 
resolved. (Or, if your employer is like distressingly many in the US these 
days, and you think they'll make your life hell for simply expressing your 
situation, then you might just want to skip straight to step 2.)

(Note: I don't assume that you're in the US; there are screwy employers 
like that in other countries, too. It's just that the US is where *my* 
experience lies, and I wanted to restrict my employer-slagging to that domain.)

                                                 --Kai MacTane
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