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?"

Comments

I'm a sysadmin who has a sysadmin

[Theatetus]

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.

Re:Quit

[cooley]

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.