King’s Rule of System Administration: You either do your job well or constantly.

The difference between a server owner and a system administrator is not small. Both groups perform the same kinds of actions on the same kinds of systems – the difference is the way they go about their jobs.

System administrators know what impact their changes and settings will have on the server’s OS, the applications that run on that OS, and the quality of the services delivered to the end user. They check with other sysadmins to make sure they haven’t missed significant details. They monitor the performance of their applications, they check through log files looking for problems, and try to be proactive in general about security. They are, almost always, subscribed to security mailing lists about products they support, and are diligent about testing applying relevant patches. They also do comprehensive backups, and test their backups by restoring files to make sure they work before they are needed. They are able to do capacity planning. Most importantly, they are able to learn new things and expand their understandings of systems to new technologies.

Server owners, on the other hand, don’t know why they are doing what they do. Not in the ‘why am I here’ sense, but more in the ‘what does this setting really mean’. They apply the application patch ‘because it’s the newest version’, not because they read the patch notes to find out what changed. They do backups only when the system is available, and it’s easy. They almost never check with other administrators, and often test their changes on production data. When they have to debug something, they look up the problem (usually via Google) and apply changes without understanding what they are doing to make it work. These are also the ones who most often tell people “it’s always been done this way”, and therefore are almost totally unable to write documentation of their systems. It is rare that they look into log files until something has gone catastrophically wrong, and they are very defensive when constructive criticism is given.

Nobody is one kind or the other, and as I’ve grown in my professional life over the last 10 years, my metric has changed. I’m sure it will keep changing. The important part is that I want to be a better sysadmin, much like I want to be a good photographer and a good parent. I know far too many people who don’t really care about doing their job right – they just come to work for the paycheck. There’s no growth when it’s just about the paycheck.