Re: [SAGE] Strategies for taking ownership of existing infrastructure?

[Martin Jackson <martin@guyver.demon.co.uk>]

Jesús, I'd suggest 3 books:

The Practice of System and Network Administration, ISBN:0201702711
Blueprints for High Availability, ISBN 0471430269
Automating Unix and Linux Administration, ISBN 1590592123

and one website

http://www.infrastructures.org

When I took control of the infrastructure at my current workplace, the 
last sysadmin had walked out, there was minimal documentation (i.e. the 
passwords) and not much else, and the was network problems like you 
would not believe, at the time I used the www.infrastructures.org 
checklist and it got me up and running I started a webpage about what I 
was doing a few ago but never finished it 
(http://www.guyver.demon.co.uk/projects/WideScaleLinuxDeployment.html) 
your welcome to look at it but its wildly out of date now and a lot has 
changed.
I've read the above 3 books and wish I had those as well at the time but 
I review them continually over and over again because there are some 
serious nuggets of information that can be found in later reads.

The best thing I suggest is auditting what you've got at the moment and 
trying to find the dependencies between them and work on a template for 
dragging the systems into some sort of standard or imposing a new 
infrastructure template using new equipment and transition all services 
to that if possible.

Good luck

-Martin Jackson

Jesús Couto wrote:

>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...
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>Jesús Couto F.
>
>
>  
>