The UNIX System Administrator

UNIX system administration can be extremely difficult if you don't take deliberate steps to make your life easier. Things experienced administrators take for granted, like automated backups and single sign on solutions, can be extremely difficult to set up initially, so often, they aren't implemented at all.

Knowing your System Administrator

Judge your system administrator by the stability of the network and the speed at which problems are resolved. Usually the invisible system administrators are the best one's. 

Things are going well, if the network is well documented, stable, secure, scalable and workstations are deployed at the push of a button. If network services are monitored and problems are resolved before they become problems. Life is good!

If you are lucky enough to have this person working for you, throw 'em a parade. They are saving you a lot of money and headache!!

Do you need a part-time UNIX Administrator?

Patch Management

A responsible administrator has an effective patch management strategy.

Installing patches is absolutely mandatory since they are usually associated with bug fixes to security, reliability, data integrity, hardware updates or software functionality.

Of course you will have to create a customized patch management policy that works for your organization, as they can occasionally conflict with the operation of business systems.

The patch processess should be automated and backup procedures should as well.  You will also need to plan for dedicated downtime to the systems to apply the patch clusters, as some clusters have been known to take hours to install and most will at least require a reboot.

Sun has been kind enough to provide a guide that is a good starting point if you don't have patch management policy for Solaris, but the general steps can be followed with any Operating System.