UNIX System Administration Handbook - Evi Nemeth [482]
In addition to documenting your local computing environment, you may want to prepare some introductory material about UNIX. Such material is essential in a university environment where the user community is transient and often UNIX-illiterate. We have printed one-page crib sheets about the vi editor, email, Usenet news, logging in and out, the X Windows environment, and the use of man pages.
27.11 PROCUREMENT
At many sites, the system administration team and the purchasing team are totally separate. This is bad.
Sysadmins need to know about any new hardware that’s being ordered in order to verify that it fits the current infrastructure and can be supported. They also need to be able to influence the specifications that go into purchase requests. Sysadmins can often provide good information about the competence of vendors (especially third-party resellers) and the reliability of certain types of equipment.
A system administrator’s participation is especially valuable in organizations that by default must buy from the lowest bidder (for example, government institutions and state universities). Most purchasing systems allow you to specify evaluation criteria. Be sure to include escape clauses such as “must be compatible with existing environment” or “must be able to run XYZ software package well.”
The incremental impact of an additional workstation is not fixed. Is it the 60th of that architecture or the first? Does it have enough local disk for the system files? Does it have enough memory to run today’s bloated applications? Is there a spare network port to plug it into? Will it be in an area of the building that is accessible to the network? Is it a completely new OS?
Questions like these tend to emphasize a more fundamental question: Do you stay stagnant and buy equipment from your current vendor, or do you try the latest whizzy toy from a startup that might shake the world or might be out of business in a year? The nature of your organization may answer this one. It’s not a simple yes or no; you must often make a complex tradeoff between the latest and greatest equipment and the machines that you are comfortable with and understand.
If you are allowed to negotiate with vendors (officially or otherwise) you can often do much better than your purchasing department. Don’t be shy about quoting prices from other vendors for comparable equipment or inflating the size of expected purchases for the coming year. After all, the sales people have inflated the value of their product. Being able to get an order out fast is useful at a bean counting boundary such as the end of a fiscal quarter or year. When you submit orders in the last week of a company’s accounting period, you can often obtain a sizable additional discount just to make a department’s quota look better. Another bargain time is just before or just after new models are introduced; vendors want to reduce their inventory of the older products. This kind of vendor bashing is common at universities and may or may not be appropriate at companies and government institutions. But it is fun.
27.12 DECOMMISSIONING HARDWARE
Retiring a computer is often a painful ordeal. Stubborn users won’t let go; weaning requires them to learn a new system or convert to new applications. Some sites convince themselves that they cannot afford a new system and force the staff to support the old one and keep it running. This conservatism usually ends up costing more than the new system would have. An aging SunOS box is impossible to upgrade to newer hardware and so is dog slow for today’s porky applications. Yet its user community is likely to be adamant about the impossibility of turning it off.
A related problem at universities involves donations from businesses that would like to get a tax deduction. Often, the right answer is, “No thanks, we don’t need 2,000 nine-track tapes and racks to