NewsForge: The Fourth Commandment of System Administration

“The role of system administrator is a role of details. Heavily
used and updated servers are filled with details, from new tables
in a database to root password changes. These details need to be
documented. When you are managing three servers, these details can
be easy enough to remember. However, when you have 30 or 50 or 100
servers, the details become impossible to keep track of without
documenting them. When it matters, you don’t want to think that the
IP address of that old accounting server is 192.168.10.55, you want
to know it.

“IV. Thou shalt keep server logs on
everything

“The only way to ensure that you know the details of all your
servers all of the time is to write them down…!”

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