Why read this?
Hi,
I am an IT systems administrator with many years’ experience of supporting and engineering various technologies. I’ve looked after *ix systems (AIX, Solaris and Linux), and several applications running higher up the stack. In particular, web technologies (Apache, Tomcat and the associated infrastructure gubbins you have to have these days) and EMC Documentum “for all your content management needs”.
The unifying factor is that while you need plenty of specific skills for each product – like how to modify the configuration files, how the API works – the same old questions come around. How do you ensure everything is up and running? How do your backups work? How can I be sure my development instance is configured the same as the production one? Most of my experience has been in large environments, where the overriding question is how to scale: no one wants to click on 100 GUI tools to reconfigure 100 instances of a product. No business wants to pay for that timewasting either.
Though the world needs another technical blog like my lawn needs another daisy, I’ll use this one first to note some of the “interesting” product-specific information I uncover and secondly to comment on the more general issues of managing a modern enterprise IT function.
Thanks for reading
Gordon