System Administrator

Dave is a Systems Administrator at a medium-sized corporation. Routine duties include looking after an LDAP directory and a couple of databases, as well as managing the company mail and file servers. He is frequently involved in a troubleshooting role, and knows how to search the web for tech tips and tricks, both using regular search engines and via his favourite site Admin-U-Like (it's fictitious, before you go looking for it!).

Dave's routine duties include a lot of stamp-collecting activities. Whenever Dave does stamp-collecting work, we'll highlight it with this little icon .

He begins today by checking the security advisories from Admin-u-Like . There are only 36 today, of which 2 are relevant to the servers that he looks after. He downloads the required patches.

While doing this, a User phones up complaining that they are locked out of their mailserver. He brings up a web front-end to the mail server, finds the user , and notes that their password has expired. He resets it for them.

While checking his mail , he finds a message from the company firewall warning of an attempted breach of system security. (He may have set up some mobile solution to also text him or send crucial alerts to his PDA. If so, he will have configured filters on his incoming mail to automatically do some oif the stamp-collecting for him. )

He checks the firewall logs , and spots some suspicious activity around 3am. He browses the database logs and directory server logs to check that nothing has gone amiss. The firewall and directory server offer web-front ends to the logs, with some time-based filtering facility. He is able to pull up the relevant time-window of the logs for comparison. The database was installed a while ago - he reads the logs for this using a high-end text editor, locating the relevant files via a desktop shortcut to the log file directory (which deserves a as he's using a file manager program).

The fileserver locks up mid-afternoon. He starts a remote connection (taken from a list of servers in the network - ) to the server, and finds that the disk is full again. Going back to his email he pulls up the address list of users and sends out a message telling them to delete their old mails. He clears out the temporary directories in the meantime and the server comes back to life.

Much of Dave's day is taken up with navigating through hierarchical lists of files, directories, networks, machines, messages etc. He's also engaged in creative and highly-skilled problem-solving work, and it's because of that that he's an asset to his employers, not his ability to categorise and navigate data structures. An integrated useable system for performing that gruntwork would leave Dave with more time to do what he does best.