WYNTK: UNIX System Admininistrator

Gather the facts before you alert your administrator.

When you go to a tax preparer, it goes much faster if you first locate and organize all your paperwork. Similarly with administrative help — you’ll get better results if you get all your facts together before you go to the administrator. Neither a tax preparer nor a system administrator can complete their work if you don’t give them all the relevant information.

Twenty questions

	The most frustrating part of the job is the twenty questions. Someone tells you about a problem and you tell them to back up a bit, and you start asking them what they were doing at the time, and whether anything changed recently, and so on. And usually they walk away before the questions are done, because in answering the questions they’ve figured it out for themselves. If they asked themselves the questions on their own, everything would go much more smoothly.
	--Eric Pearce administrator

So before you call a system administrator, do some of the leg work yourself. It helps if you know what sorts of things your administrator will be looking for and provide that information ahead of time. Copy down the error messages and maybe try to interpret them for yourself. Think of what the obvious things are and check those things first. Try doing something a couple of different ways — if one way works and another doesn’t, that will help the administrator determine where the problem lies. Write down everything you did to solve the problem and then send that in email to the administrator.

The best part is, when you’re done learning what’s what and assembling your information, you may discover that you don’t need an expert to help you after all.