Possible topics
Here are some of the articles I’m thinking of writing. Basically they divide into categories - general thoughts and overview of the world, specific practices you might want to follow, and perhaps something on skills and personal development for the individual administrator. I might also lead on from the practices to try to devise specifications for tools that would ideally support them, and try to provide links and reviews of the applications that are actually out there.
General:
- A primer on Agile development - not going into much detail, there’s a *lot* of stuff out there already
- First impressions of the lessons we can learn from Agile devt
- What is sysadmin - try to define the scope for the purposes of this site at least
- Business Agility and how IT can support it
- The challenges currently facing the SysAdmin practitioner
- Administrator vs Management - What happens when your PHB is not signed up to the importance of good admin?
- How all this relates to ITIL (and other existing
buzzwordsmethodologies) - A list of resources - just a few “getting started” pointers for Agile devt, but everything we can find related to SysAdmin.
Specific practices:
- Usage tracking - keeping an eye on the capacity of your systems and how heavily they are used.
- Microcharging - how to reflect costs back to the business
- Information Security - that is, admin information, not your organisation’s confidential data
- Documentation
- Problem management and issue tracking
- Monitoring
- Configuration management (installed stuff rather than source code, of course)
- Checklists & workflows
- Service catalogue
- Relationships between teams
- The dreaded team meeting
- Oncall and support hours
Skills and the individual
- Scripting
- Time management
- The worker-manager relationship