Responsibilities
From Sysadmin
System administration can potentially contain a wide variety of tasks. Major areas are covered here. This section will be seperated into the responsibilities for junior-intermediate sysadmins & senior sysadmins.
Junior/Intermediate System Administrators
Outage Response
Management of user accounts
System patching
System & Network Security
Project Management
Supervising
Supervising or training junior sysadmins and computer operators
Training
3rd Level Support
Network management
Resolution of end-user problems
Providing technical advice
This can vary from answering simple questions from users to providing lengthy technical feasability reports to the organisation.
Sysadmins are often called on to answer technical questions from users. Many devel- opers need to use the Unix shell to get their work done but may not be very familiar with the environment and need assistance as a result.
Backup Management
In smaller organisation the sysadmins will normally do the day to day management of the backup system. In a large organisation this function may be offloaded to data centre staff or computer operators.
Scripting/development
Senior System Administrators
The senior systadmin has as their responsibilities everything above, and the following additional responsibilities.
Capacity Planning
Design of Backup and Disaster Recovery Systems
Senior sysadmins are normally responsible for planning out of the backup system and disaster recovery strategy. This may mean making recommendations on selecting software packages, customising solutions and leading disaster recovery tests.
Network Design
Performance Tuning
Proactive work is generally more efficient than reactive
Reactive work (colloquially known as fire fighting among sysadmins)
