Newsforge
had a really great series on the Ten Commandments of system
administration. They’re fairly basic, but given the thrust, that should
be expected. Many of the commandments, though not all, are
security-related, and while I might disagree with some of the
discussion, overall all the reminders are useful to see areas you might
have simply forgotten. And there are a lot of interesting ideas I
hadn’t thought of prior to this: the commandment dealing with cable
management has some good tricks, for example. I only wish the articles
had been a little more fleshed-out, but the comments make up for it in many cases.
The 10 commandments:
- Thou shalt make regular and complete backups
- Thou shalt establish absolute trust in thy servers
- Thou shalt be the first to know when something goes down
- Thou shalt keep server logs on everything
- Thou shalt document complete and effective policies and procedures
- Thou shalt know what cable goes where
- Thou shalt use encryption for insecure services
- Thou shalt not lose system logs when a server dies
- Thou shalt know the openings into your servers
- Thou shalt not waste time doing repetitive and mundane tasks