System Administrator Weekdays: Guardians of Your Digital Security or Surviving a World of Network Failures.
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Imagine that your working day begins with a call or a message at 6 in the morning because someone on the other side of the country or even the world does not have Internet or access to this or that corporate information.
This is what a typical weekday of a system administrator (or as they are often called, sysadmin) looks like. But do not rush to sympathize – for many, this is a real calling and life on the edge of risk with a constant flavor of extreme and adrenaline.
Purpose and importance of the profession
The classic description of the position “System administrator” is a specialist who ensures stable and trouble-free operation of the entire computer infrastructure of the company. Without it, no computer, server or network will work properly. He is responsible for the installation, configuration and maintenance of hardware and software, monitors data security and ensures the availability of all necessary services for the company’s employees.
In general, the main duties of a system administrator in an IT company can look like this:
- Management and monitoring of systems and networks: Setting up, monitoring and maintaining servers and networks is the primary responsibility of a system administrator. This includes installing new ones, updating existing ones, and continuously checking the current state of servers, network devices, and other systems.
- User support: Creation and deletion of user accounts, provision of appropriate access rights. Assisting employees in solving technical problems and responding to their requests.
- Installation and configuration of software: Installation of the necessary programs, their configuration and most importantly – updates: as in any dynamically changing environment, the system administrator must constantly monitor new versions of software and update them in a timely manner.
- Security: Protection of systems from viruses and cyberattacks, configuration of firewalls and other security tools, control of access to all company systems.
- Data backup and recovery: “He who has no backups has nothing.” This axiom should be kept in mind, because in the event of a system failure, only backup copies can save all company data.
But along with the importance for users and every company, the sysadmin profession has probably collected the largest number of myths compared to others in the IT field. We have collected the most common of them, we will try to understand where is the truth, and where are just stereotypes and fictions.
The system administrator is not busy with anything – he just sits at the computer and clicks buttons all day.
Before the administrator allows himself to “rest” at the computer, which, by the way, also requires constant settings, checks and updates of all programs and systems, he also has to perform a lot of physical work.
Laying cables and networks, crimping hundreds of wires, assembling all networks together with direct connection to servers and routers are only part of his tasks. A system administrator can calmly continue to perform tasks already at the computer only after hours and sometimes days of working with various tools, systems and wires.
Speroteck system administrator Yevhen Klimanov will tell us what challenges he actually faces:
“Of the frequent ones. It works here, but it doesn’t work there. It is always a difficult challenge because you have to guess what could have gone wrong, predict this situation and ways to solve it. So don’t be surprised if the system administrator says: “rebooting, rebooting, rebooting”, because it really helps us.”
Of the serious ones. Once in one of the branches of a small bank, the cooling system failed, just in time for Easter. The backup cooling system, which automatically turned on, after several attempts to start (the automatic adjustment of the input of the power supply played a bad joke – when the power on one of the inputs appeared and then disappeared), decided that it had had enough of this, and the electronics simply stuck, giving up to participate in this violence.
6 in the morning, the day off after Easter, and it turns out that at work in the data center – Tashkent suddenly arrived. The temperature on the discs is 61 degrees Celsius. A cool and very expensive data storage system fell apart right before our eyes, giving out the failure of disks one after another, leaving only 4 pieces alive, which were absolutely not enough to return to working mode.
The situation subtly hinted at a possible forced vacation for all employees for the next few days due to downtime, because to restore everything from backups, it would be necessary to replace the failed disks, and such a number was simply not physically available, and this would require dealing with suppliers, which would take at least the next day. In a word, a dead end.
But the truth is in the eye of the beholder. If we believe that this is a dead end, then it is, but if we assume that perhaps there is a way out and make an effort to find it, then we give ourselves the opportunity to find it, which is absolutely impossible in the case when we sat down hands, and just wait “for the sea weather”.
In the end, using the principle of “KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON”, after a 100+ minute conversation with support colleagues from overseas over the phone (yes, it was over the phone, and the bill was correct), it was possible to find an option to bring the disks back to life through low- level commands on guard that are not available in the regular console. Acting at your own peril and risk – after some time the system came to life, bringing back to life Oracle DB and other happiness of the working life of a small bank. The moral of this fable is as follows — never give up!”
A system administrator knows everything.
This phenomenon can be found in small companies, where the services of third-party organizations are more often used, or if there is only one system administrator in the company, he unwittingly has to deal with all the problems.
In large corporations, there are whole departments where the responsibilities of system administrators are clearly divided: someone is responsible for the technical part, someone deals with mail and communication, and especially communicative specialists solve problems on the spot with users.
Yevhen Klimanov has a personal opinion about this myth:
“Since the very term system administrator is now a little blurred, and the semantic context has long been different, we are now DevOps, and a little programmers, and database administrators, and network administrators, and many other roles at the same time.
The main thing is to never limit yourself by thinking that I already know this (even if I know it pretty well or better than everyone else), so I don’t need this or that. A client will appear tomorrow who will ask, and you know this, and what’s next? Therefore, the main thing is to always strive to learn new things — never to close in the cocoon “I am good enough – just pay my salary””
The work of a system administrator is often accompanied by anecdotal situations. For example, the eternal battle with users who do not understand why their computer “does not turn on” (and it turns out that it is simply not connected to the outlet). Or when, after long hours of searching for a problem, it turns out that the cable was simply pulled out. And, of course, the classic “everything was working before you came.” Of course, there are requests that are completely unrelated to work duties.
We asked Yevhen Klimanov what interesting and funny things he can remember from his own experience:
The manager often thinks: since I pay monthly to this bearded man in a stretched sweater, who for some reason is loved by the accounting department (which, as you know, does not love anyone), then you can “hang” everything on him – even if he does not know, somehow he will figure it out (and he will figure it out, scratch the back of his head, grumble, “smoke” forums, read manuals and bingo!).”
“One, maybe funny, maybe not, case: somehow, ten years ago, I had to perform an exclusively high IQ demand task, namely – to adjust the TV at the home of one manager, part-time – a general – lieutenant (or vice versa – here already decide for yourself).
After a successfully completed task, it was extremely interesting to hear over a glass of cold karkade and something a little stronger, how someone in Africa built a bathhouse during hostilities (household nuances from the very distant for us, but turbulent times of one of the African republics), as it turns out, karkade works (hot – increases blood pressure, cold – lowers) and other similar stories that are unlikely to be heard from the “first mouth” in ordinary life. In this way, even in the banal setting of the TV, an individual manager may have non-obvious advantages”
And what does a modern system administrator look like? And here we come to the generally accepted portrait:
A typical sysadmin is a stern bearded uncle in a stretched sweater immersed in a pile of wires and all kinds of equipment
Yevhen Klimanov will open the veil of mystery, so who is a modern system administrator, in the conditions of a dynamic, constantly changing digital world.
“This image, of course, is an atavism that once existed. At the dawn of computing, sysadmins were like priests. Only they knew how to do certain things that were simply inaccessible to “ordinary” people because they had personal access to the shrine(!) – that is, a server room with network switches, a bunch of cables, etc.
This, in turn, contributed to the creation of a similar image (not invented at all, but certainly not universal).
Now, all your control, all sysadmin “power” is at your fingertips. You can be at a public transport stop, somewhere, you know where, and solve a customer request “help – we’ve lost everything” from the phone, or sit in a comfortable office, or at home “in a den” – it’s not important.
Therefore, the past image of a typical administrator no longer exists. The modern administrator is completely different – a young guy whose “eyes burn” when he deploys another Kubernetes test cluster, a neat family man and a lover of an active lifestyle, a bearded colleague in the “IT temple” who has access to servers on all continents straight from home — that’s all of them, many faces
The main thing, I think, is a soft skill — the desire not to stand still and move forward, gaining new knowledge. We came to this world for this – to acquire knowledge in all senses – physical and metaphorical. You stand still – and you are in the dustbin of history, procrastinating, scratching the back of your head after a glass of foamy beer, thinking that you are hopelessly behind and that there is no “point in stressing now.” Remember – we are born to acquire knowledge. Go for it!”
In conclusion, we can confidently say that the system administrator is a real watchman of the digital fortress. His work is not always visible, but without him, a modern company cannot function. This is a profession that requires a high level of knowledge, patience and the ability to quickly solve problems.
So the next time you get your computer back up and running after another crash, don’t forget to thank your system administrator – the real hero in the world of the digital Matrix.
#Speroteck Dream Team