System security administration has, for the most part, been largely ignored as network administration has flourished. The result of this is that there are large installations of NT that need to be retrofitted with some form of security administration and management system. There are various third party tools available to assist in this endeavor, but they are somewhat general and not tailored to...

Two (of the many) types of System Administrators are identified: The ‘‘System Clerk’’ simply performs clerical tasks as she is told to do them (creating accounts, installing software) while the System Advocate proactively works with users to develop and evolve the environment. Transitioning from Clerk to Advocate involves a change of attitude and ‘‘making time’’ for advocacy. Ways to develop mo...

As you’ve probably already discovered in your academic and professional lives, the audience for almost everything you write, whether it is a professor, teaching assistant, grant administrator, journal editor, colleague, program administrator, policy-maker, scientist or public health activist, is likely to view your work skeptically. In fact, reader skepticism is likely to increase in direct pro...

The behavior of a WLM-managed MVS system is sometimes best understood by looking at the goals rather than the workloads. A WLM goal occupies a space of many dimensions. The system administrator is free to burden the goal with an assortment of workloads, assign it a high or low importance, and set it a target that is somewhere between lenient and stringent. In execution, the goal may be met well...

System administrators are often asked to apply their professional expertise in unusual situations, or under tight resource constraints. What happens, though, when the “situation” is a foreign country with only basic technical infrastructure, and the task is to build systems which are able to survive and grow in these over-constrained environments? In this paper we report on our experiences in t...

Researching system administration

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