Administering Computers through Shell Scripts!

Life as a system administrator can usually be broken down into three categories:

• Tedious, repetitive tasks (a.k.a. boring tasks)
• New, innovative tasks (a.k.a. why you love the job)
• Answering users' questions (a.k.a. pulling your hair out)

The goal of this blog is to help you create new and innovative solutions to eliminate those tedious and repetitive tasks. As far as answering users' questions go, if you find a way of automating that task, please let me know! But even if you can't, you can at least create a system that detects and even fixes many problems before the users even notice. Also, any task that you have automated is a possible task that the users can perform on their own.

The tedious tasks can be broken down into the following categories:

Pre-Installation: Assigning IP address, configuring existing servers and network services, and so on.

Installation: Installing a new operating system and preparing it for automation.

Configuration: Performing initial configuration and reconfiguration tasks.

Managing Data: Duplicating or sharing data (user's home directories, common scripts, web content, etc.), backups, and restores.

Maintenance and Changes: Rotating logs, adding accounts, and so on.

Installing/Upgrading Software: Using package management and/or custom distribution methods.

System Monitoring and Security: Performing log analysis and security scans, monitoring system load, disk space, drive failures, and so on.