SysAdminHints

System adminstration has a long history. Probably the largest and best collection of papers on sysadmin is the USENIX Proceedings.

This document is a collection of ideas with no particular order about sysadmin and devops. It's a companion to Pykern DesignHints, which talks about coding. If you are into DevOps, you should read that, too, because devops is more about coding than sysadmin.

TODO

• reserve disk space: users fill up space and you may need it some day
• fail fast (can't say this enough)
• write scripts (devops)
• use emacs shells: logging, search, mistakes, etc.
• plan for growth of numbering/naming
• bundling work in devops is important due to long build/run times. For example, during operating system upgrade also update packages since they all need to be tested.
• g --after=40 'def get_data_file' template > x is useful; Caveat: g --after=40 get_data_file > x will run forever
• Think like a toolmaker. [Private notes: https://github.com/radiasoft/discuss/issues/9]