WYNTK: UNIX System Admininistrator

For user problems, administrators are more like detectives than like magicians.

When users have a problem, 90 percent of the time the administrator spends on it is gathering information. After that, it’s just a matter of ruling out possibilities, making theories, and tweaking things until they work.

Let’s take a case: a user complains that the printer doesn’t work. The administrator needs to find out what printer he was using and whether other people can use that printer. This tells the administrator whether the problem is with the physical printer.

If the printer is fine, the next thing is to find out if the user can print other files. This tells the administrator whether something is wrong with the user’s configuration in general, or whether the problem is something specific to printing this particular file.

If the user’s configuration is okay, next the administrator might find out how the file was created. She might then try to create another file the same way. This tells her if there’s something wrong with the application that created it.

And so on. UNIX administrators go through the same process that we all do with a puzzle. We isolate the possible problem areas until we pinpoint where things went wrong.