The Rules

I was looking through an old file today and found an article I clipped from CIO magazine in 2005 about “The Rules of IT.” This reminded me of a white board where I used to work which had random but excellent rules about systems administration.

Here are my favorite rules from the CIO article:

  1. Open systems succeed.
  2. Proprietary systems fail in the long run.
  3. Know your estimation factor (know how off you generally are in your resource estimations)
  4. Technology is not a problem (people are..).
  5. Never say no to a user–just put a price tag on yes. (I use this one a lot)

Here are my favorite rules I recall from that White Board of Yore:

  1. Backups are sacred.
  2. If you’re going to do something several times, then automate it.
  3. Document what you do.
  4. Stick with default configurations as much as possible.
  5. If you’re afraid to shut the system down because you think it might not come up again, then it’s not a stable system. (my personal favorite)

2 Responses to “The Rules”

  1. skvidal said:

    Jul 25, 08 at 2:29 pm

    I believe those are documented here:

    http://sethdot.org/~skvidal/misc/sysadmin-aphorisms.txt

  2. admin said:

    Jul 25, 08 at 5:31 pm

    Sweet! And I almost remembered them almost correctly. Thanks.


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