Chapter 5. Sysadmin Toolkit
A toolkit represents a collection of useful items to support a particular set of purposes. In my early sysadmin years, I had a physical kit in my laptop bag that included various items to support the work I encountered. It varied over time, but essentials included a pen and a Sharpie for labeling, sticky notes (folded over a cable; they were super helpful in tracing gnarly cable issues), a mini screwdriver set to open cases and replace hardware, bootable CDs for a wide spread of operating systems, and a lot of different cables and dongles.
The modern sysadmin toolkit focuses more on nonphysical essential tools. Your working environment is your first managed system and part of your kit. This chapter shows you how to build your digital kit by adopting a codified development environment so that you can automate everyday tasks and improve collaboration with your users and colleagues by sharing your kit or adopting tools or practices from theirs.
What Is Your Digital Toolkit?
As a system administrator, you are responsible for the reliability of systems. Whatever your specific role is, whatever the system is, you need a safe way to simulate a realistic model of your production environment to tinker with and figure out workable processes. Ultimately, you want to identify resilient and sustainable ways to operate.
Your digital toolkit is a development environment that helps you minimize the risk to any customer-facing system by giving you the set of tools ...
Get Modern System Administration now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
