[SAGE] Strategies for taking ownership of existing infrastructure?

[Jesús Couto <jesus.couto@gmail.com>]

Hi.

The subject line sound awful (and its my first post :-/). Basically
I'm just asking for advice for the following situation:

I'm now the primary sysadmin dealing with Unix systems, somewhere. As
such, I've find myself inheriting the current infrastructure... what
that means?

It means I have to support process & applications I dont know about &
didnt install, and are not documented... basically, things "work", by
virtue of being more or less evolved and hammered till they do, but I
dont have a clear picture of ... well anything, and the way thing
works is very brittle. One machine uses one mail server, another uses
other that is not listed anywhere, DNS is not coherent either, with
each machine configured to use either a differen server or its own
/etc/hosts files... same for proxies, same for... everything. List of
things "wrong" here is enourmous, mainly in the "this thing doesnt
scale and sure it is not easy to transfer admin to anybody that was
not here where the working hacks where put in place".

I guess people here have found themselves in the same situation... I'm
trying to organize my ideas at all levels (technical, practices &
procedures, organization, "office politics") about how to get to own
the place. So any tip or advice you can come up with is welcome.

Thanks in advance... I'll try to work on putting whatever suggestions
you come up and my ideas in place...


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Jesús Couto F.