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:
- Open systems succeed.
- Proprietary systems fail in the long run.
- Know your estimation factor (know how off you generally are in your resource estimations)
- Technology is not a problem (people are..).
- 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:
- Backups are sacred.
- If you’re going to do something several times, then automate it.
- Document what you do.
- Stick with default configurations as much as possible.
- 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)
skvidal said:
Jul 25, 08 at 2:29 pmI believe those are documented here:
http://sethdot.org/~skvidal/misc/sysadmin-aphorisms.txt
admin said:
Jul 25, 08 at 5:31 pmSweet! And I almost remembered them almost correctly. Thanks.