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A Sysadmin for Sysadmins?
crazyharry asks: "I have recently been hired to be a system administrator to a bunch of system administrators. Aside from my personal experience, which is probably biased, I would like to know from the disproportionately large number of IT people here: if you, as a system administrator, were forced to have a system administrator, what would you expect of that role? How would you want your business machines (not the ones you admin, but your daily use machines) managed, if they were not up to this point? This is a mixed environment (Windows, Mac, and Linux/Unix), so feel free to assume I've already heard the 'leave me the FSCK alone' comments. What other issues are probably going to crop up, if you have been in a similar situation?"
This seems to be the opposite of what other people say, but as a sysadmin who has a sysadmin I can say I like mine because I never have to apply my sysadmin-ing to our internal computers. I don't expect to be given Special Powers just because I've got root somewhere else, but I expect the same quality of service I deliver to our external clients (well, OK, I expect better than that).
I'm not root on our local Linux boxes; I'm not a domain admin on our local Windows domain (though I think I'm a schema admin for some reason) -- I don't want to be. I want the local resources I need to connect out and do my work, and I don't want to have to think about them.
YMMV.
All's true that is mistrusted
I think a sysadmin can be of good use to sysadmins, in the right environment, though I must admit I've never done that. Right now I'm sysadmin for a bunch of software developers, but I've never admin-ed admins.
Anyway, I look at it like this. Part of what a sysadmin does is decide what hardware we need, and order stuff. If I had another sysadmin ordering crap for me, that would be great! I'll worry about what the clients need, you order me a copy of the new version of XXX, or roll up to my desk with a gigabit network card and a grin on your face. That'd be great.
When was the last time any of us Sysadmins came to work and somebody said "I ordered us all a sweet new mouse" or "hey the router config was horked, that's why we were having problems" or "hey, the RAID we back up to was getting kinda full, so I got us a shitload more drives". All those things, I ordered or fixed myself and *then* had to go be a sysadmin for the clients' machines.
In a lot of companies, you're ordering/configuring/maintaining licenses and hardware for somebody else's business, or somebody else's department, or whatever. In my book, if the funds are there to have soembody around to take over those duties for my own department, that's cool. Just because I *can* do something doesn't mean I have time to.
Sure, I'll fix my box when it has an issue. It's not like these sysadmins will need tech support; In the end IMHO your best use as an admin's admin isn't that much different though, aside from that. Keep stuff running smoothly so that I don't have to think about it. With users it's the same thing, except in this case the users are thinking about somebody else's network instead of shiny foil or whatever it is non-sysadmins think about.
Just then the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders started yelling Everything You Know Is Wrong!-Weird Al
I work in a department of computer scientists, where the average user is more than capable of providing their own sysadmin support. We do have a computing support department.
Effectively, the users partition themselves into two camps.
The first camp is more supported. They have the "official" image loaded on their hard drives, they log into the domain as users, and so on. When their stuff breaks, support comes out and fixes it.
The second camp is less supported. They have a "if I don't bother you, can you not bother me?" policy. They can run whatever they want, but if something breaks, they have to fix it themselves. Want to load Yellow Dog BSD on that old AIX box? Sure thing, just don't call us. Support will (at most) reimage you and put you in the first camp. Access to certain resources is more limited (non-support-sanctioned UNIX machines cannot mount NFS, for example).
I'm in Group 2. For us, support has been liberally good with requests outside the user's local domain of responsibility. For example, if a printer I use breaks, or I need an IP address assigned, or I'm having a problem with mail on the server side (and I'm really, really sure it's not a client side problem) they are more than happy to help. Activities where a user in Group 2 negatively affects other users (getting infected with a worm or port scanning the local net for fun) are rare and handled on a case-by-case basis. The worst penalty is that they'll unplug your wall jack from the switch and that generally keeps the rest of the users humming along quite nicely until you get your situation resolved.
In my experience, this is an effective compromise. Users in the first camp get more of support's facilities in exchange for some freedom. Users in the second camp get more freedom in exchange for less support. Anything in the "neutral zone" gets handled equally for both parties. In general, this keeps most people happy, including support, advanced users, and more mainstream users.