What makes a "Good" or "Great" Administrator? [closed]

Solution 1:

• a desire to have things right.
• the ability to cobble kick-ass solutions together when you realize "right" is unachievable.
• the willingness to "own" a problem and see issues through to conclusion.
• the willingness to call out and own problems even if no one's reported it.
• the ability and desire to replace yourself with a small shell script once you've mastered a problem (to free yourself up to find and address the next problem).
• the drive to self-evaluate and to always make things better, even if your users are already happy.
• And, above all, the ability to take a deep breath, exhale, and deal with the latest fire that just got dropped in your lap.

Solution 2:

A good administrator in my eyes should have a few qualities:

1. The ability to learn and adapt This is absolutely key. The world is a dynamic place and sooner or later any administrator will have to move to a system they're unfamiliar with. Be able to accept change and make it work to your advantage. A great way to be able to do that is to keep one's eyes peeled on the horizon and examine new technologies as they appear to consider their applicability to your business.

2. Know the system your administer Again, this is indispensable. There's no way to fully utilize or protect your system if you don't understand what it's doing. That doesn't necessarily mean understanding how a Carry-Lookahead addder is implemented in your CPU, but understand how PHP interacts with apache to produce its output. Understand how Active Directory works if you're a network admin, etc.

3. The ability to deal with management Seriously, you could be the best admin in the world but unless you can convince your boss to buy you that new server, stuff will never get done.

4. Think fast I'm not sure what you can do to prepare for this... Play racquetball, maybe? Honestly, this one comes from experience. Murphy's Law will always find and pillage you, so best be prepared to deal with it.

There's more, but I think these are 4 key ones. XD

Solution 3:

I think the ability to work with the people you're supporting at the right level is important. As a power user/developer I hate it when sys-admins treat me like an idiot or a disruptor when I'm trying to sort out a problem or get something done.

The same is true for development teams: they often throw things onto the sys admin without any context or explanation and expect immediate action.

So I guess in both cases good communication skills are critical.