Administer without a tie.

    In system administration, there are at least two opposing approaches, I call them “From shit and sticks” (di_halt), he is also the “left-handed” and “dude” approach. Judging by the abundance of holivars on the Internet, each of them has enough adherents. Each administrator chooses for himself one of the approaches based on internal beliefs and the realities of life. Most often, he has to make various kinds of compromises both with his conscience and with his IT budget.

    Of course, there is also a third approach - “razdolbaisky”, but somehow I don’t really want to talk about it. If the administrator wants to put things in order, they will. If you do not want, then a lot of money and modern equipment will not help. There are a lot of examples of this approach at the current work.

    Each of the listed administrator behavior styles is 70% dependent on himself and only on the remaining 30% of the working environment. Someone damn interested in squeezing the incredible out of absolute trash, someone give the white floor and automated tape libraries. The first one is shaking the forums looking for the motherboard and PSU for its new super-server on Gentoo, the second one will meticulously study the contract for the extended RHEL technical support for the cluster on the Sun Fire X. One will consider the other to be a gobbling celestial, and the second to be a flaming child. However, which is characteristic, both will be right.

    How do you know which type you belong to? Simple enough. I must answer to myself (only honestly) the following several questions.

    1) The first and most important question. In the supermarket, you, angry at home, constantly shift purchases in the basket in the most optimal way, you know more than the electricians who make wiring from the electric network, you are “rushing” from dozens and hundreds of live, working and performing their computers computers in your hands, you have no days off and it’s not scary; can they call your phone at any time of the day or night? Not? Do not read further, you are not an admin at all. Take care of management, become a user, or, at worst, you can always start cleaning floors or windows. The world is great.

    2) Are you interested in assembling a car that will work faster than anyone, but money at the same time zero-point-ten-tenths and 100 rubles from your pocket? Search all forums, find the most optimal hardware, compile software with clever keys, optimize the tcp / ip stack, so what, rewrite it! To achieve inclusion of the patches in official SVN and for a long time, to correct by hands? Good. And one more time? And 2 more times? And 2 more times 2 times? And 10 times 10? If the answer is still yes, then you are a real “lefty”. Grateful GPL's will put a monument to you during your lifetime. Google started with this approach, and quite well finished.

    3) You do not consider it shameful to forget the password for the server (after all, it is still written down somewhere in the volume of the technical documentation) and you even allow yourself not to keep in mind in which rack it is located, your main goal is to touch the machine as little as possible, force her to do absolutely everything herself from a software update to a ban of delinquent users; You, with bated breath, dream about uptime at 10 years old, but damn it, the last failure was just 3 years ago due to the scum of electricians disconnecting at the same time (who could imagine!) The main feeder and the line coming from the diesel engine in the yard? Even if this diesel engine is located only in sweet dreams, because you still managed to convince the authorities to purchase the routers and switches instead of D-Link for the whole company by some incredible miracle and at the cost of a pair of gray hair? You are a "dude." You can easily manage with a dozen or a hundred other machines, you have the perfect order in the server room and after your death, even the cleaning lady will be able to change tapes for backups for a long time according to the instructions left. The RAO UES data center is for you, as well as the MSC RAS.

    Any resemblance to real characters is completely random.
    When writing this opus, unfortunately, not a single hamster was injured.
    Outside the window -10º; Bill Gates is still rich.

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