Every sysadmin, network admin, and DBA has their own toolbelt of vital timesavers and lifesavers they use to pull themselves out of a jam or avoid problems before they arise. Half the game is finding the good tools - the other half is sorting out how they work.

Plenty of sites help you find the tools you need but few point out the tools that would be elevated from good to great if only the documentation was as good as the tool. I aim to fix that with the first ever LOPSA Underdocumented Tool Challenge!

Send us your nominations for best underdocumented tool by July 6th, we'll publish the top 10. The best nomination will win a prize of my choosing.

During the recent LoPSA live chat on #lopsa-live it was mentioned that there weren't enough topics for people to write about on the website and how it was harder for people to come up with an interesting topic than it was to actually write about that. That inspired me to finally draft a proposed series of topics based around the notion of "Scaling Up"; something that’s been bouncing around in my head for a few years.

Motivation

We spend a lot of effort building and describing tools and techniques - the craft of system administration. A precious few tomes reach beyond the command line to discuss the practice of system administration (I'm thinking specifically of the works of Tom Limoncelli & Christine Hogan.) What I'm searching for is a bridge between the two topics - what you want to eventually achieve and why (practice) and how you can actually achieve that (craft.)

Frustration, not Necessity, is the mother of Invention.

So I'm wont to think of ways I can contribute to that-what-was-once-SAGE and I'm reminded of tal & Christine's book and the triage/stable/icing approach to operations. For example, triage is "put all your local scripts & software into version control", stable is "build a software depot", and icing is "automate the bejeezus out of your system build process." Something like that.

That presumes that your ops organization evolves faster than the systems that they manage, and that's a fine and reasonable approach. The problem I'm concerned with is coming into a small organization with an ad-hoc design and trying to restructure it so it's in a position to scale. My frustration comes both from my experience growing my home network as well trying to apply some structure and best practices to my employer - in both cases, I'm the sole sysadmin.