Linux System Administration Recipes A Problem-Solution Approach

C H A P T E R 12■ ■ ■Managing Time and PeopleAnother thing that sysadmins spend a lot of time doing—stereotypes notwithstanding—is dealing withpeople. Usually, the people are bringing you problems to solve. This chapter looks at how to managethese interruptions of your time and how to keep track of the enormous number of things that getdumped on your desk on a daily basis. Several recipes cover setting up RT, a ticketing system, to helpyou keep track of what’s going on. Finally, there's some tips on keeping your colleagues on your side.Working life is a lot easier if you limit your battles to being against software rather than people!12-1. Managing the Interrupt-Driven Nature ofSysadmin WorkThere’s a tendency for sysadmin work to be very interrupt-driven. Bugs and problems crop up all thetime, and sometimes those are important enough that you really do need to drop whatever you’recurrently working on. Sometimes they’re not, but your concentration may nevertheless be brokenwhenever something new is brought to your attention, especially if someone comes to your desk inperson. So, it can be difficult to get time to work on major projects, and even smaller projects may sufferbecause of the time it takes to pick up your train of thought again after you’re interrupted.There are various options and techniques for dealing with this. One possibility, if you can manage it,is to block out specific times of the day or week where you aren’t available to be disturbed. If you’reworking with colleagues, you can arrange for one person to be on call and the others to be left alone. Ifyou’re working on your own, you have to manage it a little differently. You could consider turning youre-mail off for a couple of hours at a stretch, moving to a different location in the building for a couple ofhours, or working from home. You may want to put some system in place that is triggered if a reallyimportant alert occurs; see Chapter 3 for discussion of Nagios. Also, make sure someone knows how tocontact you if there’s a genuine emergency!You may be inclined to think, as a solo sysadmin, that making yourself unavailable for blocks of timewill lead to everything falling apart. First, your systems really should be able to look after themselves fora while without your input. Second, if you can’t spend half a day somewhere else concentrating on otherthings, what happens when you’re ill or on leave? It’s useful to have appropriate reporting and escalationprocedures in place anyway, and you can see your “not available” time as a way of checking that thesesystems are working properly.A lot of this relies on you managing, or reacting according to, the expectations and behavior of yourcolleagues. It’s no good turning your e-mail off and ignoring the phone if the norm in your place of workis to come to your office in person with problems. See recipe 12-4 for some discussion of this.231Download at WoweBook.Com