Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two

Hack #43. Avoid Common Junior Mistakes

Get over the junior admin hump and land in guru territory.

No matter how "senior" you become, and no matter how omnipotent you feel in your current role, you will eventually make mistakes. Some of them may be quite large. Some will wipe entire weekends right off the calendar. However, the key to success in administering servers is to mitigate risk, have an exit plan, and try to make sure that the damage caused by potential mistakes is limited. Here are some common mistakes to avoid on your road to senior-level guru status.

Don't Take the root Name in Vain

Try really hard to forget about root. Here's a quick comparison of the usage of root by a seasoned vet versus by a junior administrator.

Solid, experienced administrators will occasionally forget that they need to be root to perform some function. Of course they know they need to be root as soon as they see their terminal filling with errors, but running su -root occasionally slips their mind. No big deal. They switch to root, they run the command, and they exit the root shell. If they need to run only a single command, such as a make install, they probably just run it like this:

	$ su -c 'make install'

This will prompt you for the root password and, if the password is correct, will run the command and dump you back to your lowly user shell.

A junior-level admin, on the other hand, is likely to have five terminals open on the same box, all logged in as root. Junior admins don't consider keeping ...