Outage Procedures

Some administrators joke that they'd need to start ripping cables out of their data centers and put them back an hour later to be recognized for outstanding performance during an “outage.” Right or wrong, a Unix network's outages (or lack thereof) often are the metric with which the Unix system administrator is judged. What was your uptime this year? Did you meet your clients' service levels? Remember that time your mail server was down? Both clients and management care about outage issues, so it's worth your time to craft procedures that will help you minimize outages and their downtimes.

Escalation procedures exist to move a problem up the chain of command until eventually someone in the chain can solve the problem. Procedures ...

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