WYNTK: UNIX System Admininistrator

Educated users get better help.

Your chances of getting help from your administrator are better if you know more about what’s happening.

Why? Well, apart from the technical snobbery, there are also some legitimate reasons:

• Educated users are more likely to give the administrator the information needed to solve the problem quickly, without having to do a lot of detective work. If instead of saying “I can’t print,” you say “the xmail program doesn’t print correctly, although I can print from other programs,” you will save a lot of time for the administrator.

• Educated users are more likely to be able to act on a quick answer, such as “looks like your .login file is broken.” For another user without much UNIX background, the administrator may have to compose email explaining what the .login file is, why a change to that file might cause the problem, how to fix it, etc.

• Sometimes an educated user may know exactly what the problem is and even offer the solution.

To illustrate the different responses that two users might get, compare the following two mail messages:

I'm having trouble editing /home/lois/updates. I use the emacs program to edit. I typed:

% emacs updates

The error I got was:

Please set the environment variable TERM; see tset(1).

I also tried editing other files, but it didn't work for them either.

I didn't use to have any trouble. But my X terminal was given to someone else yesterday,
so I'm logging in from my Macintosh. Is that the problem?

In this message, the user says what the symptom was, what she typed, and what error message she got. She also describes something that changed, which may or may not be a factor. This is a lot easier to respond to than:

I can’t edit my files! What’s going on?

Intimate computing

	On the Mac, I never understood what was going on behind the scenes. You’d pull down a menu and click. What was actually happening was anyone’s guess. UNIX forces you to become much more intimate with computing.
	--Allen Noren

Error messages

	Whenever a user gets an error message, they should just cut and paste it, both the error and the command that they ran, and email it to me. That gives me the best chance of figuring it out without having to go to their office and watch over their shoulder.
	--Tanya Herlick administrator

In the second message, any number of things might be wrong. The administrator doesn’t know what editor program the user uses, what files she was trying to edit, whether she used to be able to edit files, or whether something changed recently.

The first message can be solved very quickly: the administrator sees the error, interprets it, and can send off a quick message to the user explaining what to type into her .login file. The second message is one that the administrator can’t know the answer to without more information, so it may be put on the back burner until the administrator has more time to spend on it.