Posted by simonw on Sun 10 Jul 2005 at 12:23
One of the unwritten rules of good system administration is never to schedule unattended jobs for times when you won't be there to pick up the pieces (or more crucially not for a time when everyone is asleep).
Conventional system administration wisdom says schedule these tasks for quiet times, and indeed for many system admins that meant outside of 9 to 5 Monday to Friday. But conventional system administration dealt with a small number of tightly controlled servers, providing services for the working week, and arose in a time when computing resources were scarce.
For many these assumptions are no longer valid. Servers run 24x7, and ways and means exist to avoid the substantial down time backups use to mean. Hardware is cheap, and even when busy the OS can schedule its work sensibly so as not to impact response dreadfully when running a backup.
Thus the thing to do is schedule the tasks when it suits the humans managing them, not when it suits the machines. For most of us this doesn't mean starting backups at midnight, or running cron jobs before 07:00 in the morning.
This rule I understand well, so why did my pager go off at 06:35 this morning, when the Apache log file rotation messed up? It is not enough to be a good system administrator, one must also dot the i's cross the t's, and "$EDITOR /etc/crontab".
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