What
Does a System Administrator Do?
What
is a system administrator? Well, look at the title. Administrator of systems. A
system administrator
takes care of systems.
Now,
most people read "system" to mean an individual computer, and think
that all a sysadmin
does is clean viruses off your computer and replace your monitor. That's not
wrong -- but it is only one page of the whole story.
A
real computing system is larger. Very few computers work just on their own
anymore; when you use the web, play a game online, share files with a friend,
or send email, you're using a complex and intricate collection of computers,
networks and software that come together to do the job you're asking.
A
sysadmin
manages these systems -- they figure out how to bring storage from one server,
processing from another, backups from a third and networking from a fourth
computer all together, working seamlessly. For you.
It's not an easy
task. Your sysadmins need to
understand in depth computing protocols. They often have to know something
about programming, something about hardware, a lot about software -- and even
more about the people using their system.
A
sysadmin
is a professional, with complex skills, ethical challenges, and a daunting job.
Many, if not most, people find computers difficult to use, and sometimes
they're unreliable. Being a sysadmin
doesn't absolve someone of dealing with unreliable computers. Oh, one can dream
of such a day, but the opposite is true; no one sees more dead computers in a
day than a sysadmin.
No one sees them doing truly baffling things, and no one has more stories of
computers failing, acting possessed, or even catching on fire.
The
challenge of a sysadmin
is making a computing system -- a whole network of resources and servers and
software -- work together, work right, work even when parts of it fail -- and
work for you.
That's
the most important job of the sysadmin:
to work for you. To take the staggering array of technologies, acronyms,
protocols, networks, vendors, budgets, limited time, competing products, and
threats to the computing network, assemble them all together in a working
system. Their job is not only to be the geek in the corner who types all day.
What they're doing is bringing these diverse pieces of technology into order,
and fitting them together to fill your needs at work and home; to translate the
world of computing into human terms.
This
is a daunting task and we're still at the cutting edge; we're not perfect, and
the field is still figuring itself out. Being a sysadmin takes a certain boldness, to
be one of the first people to take on the challenge of turning difficult
computers into easy to use systems. But hundreds of thousands of people are
working in that field now, from the entry level help desk tech to the corporate
CIOs and everyone in between.
So
when you think of a sysadmin,
think of the people who run the servers that help you clean it off, the people
who run your backups to make sure your data is safe, the people who bring you
the network, the people who monitor it for security -- and yes, the person who
cleans the virus off your computer and replaces your monitor.
