System Administration tips

I found these while going through stuff in my documents, I think that they are good general guidelines

• Carefully research and document problems before making changes.
• Don’t make changes for the sake of change.
• Have others sanity check your proposal before implementation, then test and retest the changes.
• Explain the risks to management and IT colleagues before deployment.
• Maintain good backups, and develop sound restore procedures.
• Keep detailed configuration information for all systems.
• Have a tested local Administrator username and password for all systems in case you lose any network connectivity.
• Distribute a step-by-step procedure before rolling out significant changes.
• Develop a what-if list of things that could go wrong and the appropriate fallback procedures. This list should include plans to address potential problems that might occur days later (e.g., a server failure).
• Notify users well in advance of when a project will begin and end and of any planned outages.
• Keep a written log of activities during the changes.
• Carefully review logs to monitor system operation before and after implementing changes.
• Test the results from a user’s point of view. Use a non-privileged user account from a typical workstation.
• Coordinate with support staff and try to anticipate any user education needs that might arise.
• Document the procedures and save these files for future use.

Here are two related sysadmin books that I find helpful…