Systems Administration

(Text book: The Practice of System and Network Administration, Third Edition )

- Answer in your own words, Full and Short answer (No more 5 lines for each questions).

Part 1

1. Why is it important to automate OS installation?

2. How does Kanban work?

3. How does a ticket system improve our ability to track WIP?

4. Compare and contrast a ticket system and Kanban.

5. Is it better to fail over or take down a perfectly running system than to wait until it fails on its own?

6. Why is it better to push a new software release into production monthly rather than every six months?

7. What is the small batches principle?

8. Why are big batches more risky than small batches?

9. Describe the minimum viable product (MVP) strategy. What are the benefits of it versus a larger, multi-year project plan?

10. Why is it better to have a small improvement now than a large improvement a year from now?

11. What are the benefits of moving variations to the end of the process?

12. What is a snowflake server? Why are they a bad idea?

13. How is mass-production aided by moving variations to the end?

14. How do paper-like systems help us be more efficient?

15. What is state? What is irreproducible state?

16. A laptop and a desktop PC are very different. In what way could we treat them both as paper?

17. How do paper-like systems help us scale services?

18. How do configuration management systems differ from other software that system administrators use to control our systems?

19. Why is it important to know the history of changes to a system?

20. What are some principles of IaC?

21. What is idempotency? Why are most CM systems idempotent?

22. What is a declarative language? How is it different from an imperative language?

23. What are some key software engineering principles or techniques that have been adopted by system administrators to create IaC?

24. What are the benefits of IaC?

Part 2

1. Which RAID characteristics would you want for an array supporting real-time data collection from environmental sensors or factory monitoring and why?

2. Explain several ways that automation can improve our SA productivity. What two common SSA tasks might benefit most from automation and how can we apply it to them.

3. Compare the small batch principle with lean development techniques. To illustrate explain how these approaches address concerns such as risky behaviors, MVP, product QA and product release.

4. Explain how ‘porcelain ‘systems differ from ‘paper system'. For each type of system, give three examples (6 total) of proper application.