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Ones employment objectives change over the years based upon there
accumulative experience, current interests and industry trends. I know
mine are not the same as they were 5, 10, 15 or 20 years ago. My
expectations of myself, and my job, are not just one of these listed
below. Ideally, my position would include all of them, but
realistically I would hope to have a mix of at least two or three of
these duties. I have listed my objectives in order of my greatest
amount of knowledge and interest. |
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I use the word Management
instead of Administrate because I believe my experience goes beyond the
OS and hardware administration of a physical system. Management also
involves the implementation and integration of the OS and hardware with
applications and their users. System administration involves hardware upkeep, OS and patch
updates, adding more system memory and disk space. Management includes
insuring the health status of the system and applications. Scripted
monitoring of standard UNIX utilities such as SAR, vmstat, netstat, top
and glance make system failure detection proactive. Logging, email and
paging alerts provide communications to SAs responsible for the system.
Application management must also be proactive. What good is a
healthy system when the application is not running correctly? Creating
scripted monitors to watch process status, application error logs,
stale output logs can accomplish this goal. Software from Tivile, ITO
and NetSaint can also do the job for both system and application
monitoring. But even they need to execute custom scripts to do an
adequate job. I have been doing system management for many years.
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HTML Developer
CGI Programmer
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Many customized system and application scripts produce output as a
result of their execution. Many are interactive with the executor. An
ascii or tty interface is typical for such things, however using a CGI
as the script and a browser as the interface eliminates the needs for a
rsh, ssh, telnet? session with the host. If you are on the intranet,
you have access to the script. There are hundreds of applications for
CGI in system and application administration. I have been writing
scripts for system administration for 17 years and writing CGIs for 7
years. |
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A large part of my experience has been in data center environments. I have created
customized virtual data centers using CGIs,
HTML documented procedures and 2-way interactive pagers to receive
alerts as well as issue server commands remotely. I have also done
extensive work with system and application support logs where on call
individuals record issues as they are being dealt with during their
shift. On call turnover is made easier when the previous shift has
complete documentation that can be searched and appended to. This also
leaves tracks in the sand to assist in future similar issue resolution.
I have recently implemented an extensive CGI based on call application.
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A WebMaster is one who manages the httpd services of a site or sites.
This includes installation, configuration and updating the httpd
server. Building dedicated and virtual web sites. Establishing site,
directory and CGI user access. Overseeing content publishing and in
some cases content review. Secured sites require the acquisition and
installation of a secured certificate from an organization such as
VeraSign. Sites hosted by multiple servers require load-balancing
administration. Traffic analysis is an important part of a commercial
web sites administration. All httpd servers generate an access log
which must be analyzed to extract legible reports. Hits, downloads,
home page views, html page views, specific page views, image reports,
referrer reports, specific referrers, browser types, httpd status
codes, all of these items are recorded in the access log. I have
extensive experience with writing access log evaluation programs in ksh
and perl with CGI/browser report interfaces. I use gnuplot to graph
traffic data over time. Accrue provides a high-end web site traffic
analysis tool called Insight. It?s expensive but does an outstanding
job. I have performed all these tasks on Netscape Enterprise and
Commerce servers, Apache, SWS (Sun Web Server), Zeus and SilverStream
httpd servers. |
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