Top 10 tasks that system administrators need most Automation

A system administrator who does everything himself or herself is wasting not only his own time, but also your time. Tasks that require repeated execution by the system administrator should be automated. By automating these tasks through scripts, specialized software, and System Scheduling, you can save the system administrator's time and money, and prevent human errors. The tasks of these 10 System Administrators are the primary goal of automation. They can help you automate your daily work.

1. Patch
Manual patching is required only for a few systems that do not provide an automatic patching mechanism. Both Linux and Windows provide automatic update tools, but if you want to control which patches your system receives and when to receive them, you can study HP's data center automation center (hpdcac) (opsware in the past ). Hpdcac (HP's data center automation center) is not just an application with automatic PatchingProgramIt can manage complex infrastructure through a single, simple user interface. If you are looking for a pure patching solution, you can try ecora's Patch Manager, which supports agent-free Patch Management.

2. Maintenance of users and groups
You may have used Active Directory, LDAP, NIS +, or other user and group account management software. However, have you ever used a user and group account management software that really satisfies you? None of them satisfy you because they do not provide much automation. Of course, you can create a user account, delete a user account, create groups, and manage these groups. However, when actual management tasks are involved, you may not be able to find the right tool. You have to use the script to create such a tool.

In UNIX, a script is created to remind you which accounts you want to delete, so that the system can copy user files to a new location and Change permissions, it is very easy to search for any files of a user in all systems, change the permissions of these files, or delete them by deleting a user account from the directory service. You can check whether the additional modules of your user management tool provide such functions. For example, Microsoft provides an Active Directory Resource Kit book and a CD containing common automated scripts.

3. Security Scanning
You should periodically perform automated security scans throughout your network to detect and fix any Network Vulnerabilities. The scanning frequency and depth are related to the complexity of your network. By writing scripts, you can create a scheduled scan, send the scan results to the database, extract the scan reports from the database, and then email them to yourself, or, you can make the report into an html version to facilitate online browsing. There is such a tool that applies to all modern operating systems, and it is NMAP. NMAP is a free network security scanner designed to quickly scan large networks and report vulnerabilities.

4. disk usage Scan
Between users and system administrators, there is a long-drawn and intense "battle for Territory", which is a "war" that system administrators must win ". For this purpose, the system administrator can use some "means": disk space limit, disk partition, and disk space scan. These scans are used to regularly check the disk space usage of users. People who make mistakes often receive one or two warnings before contacting the system administrator in private. For the "silkworms" of disk space, the common remedy is to temporarily disable its account, delete files, move files to a new location, or expand the disk space limit. Automated scans that are performed on a regular basis (approximately once a week) can prevent system administrators from making rude moves and let users know the usage of their disk space.

5. Performance monitoring
If you want to observe the system performance at a single time point, it is a good way to take a temporary performance snapshot. This method can only observe one pixel in the entire performance image. You need to have a certain depth and breadth to provide performance trends and high peak and low valuation prediction tools. It is easy to use Orca to establish such a system. Orca can compile performance data from different data sources (UNIX, windows, and Linux) and create an intuitive performance image. It can automatically collect, compute, and generate and display images.

6. file transmission
Using command line scripts (Windows, UNIX, and Linux), you can automatically transfer files between hosts. You do not need to perform this task through human-machine conversations. If you are smart enough, you can establish various detailed automation solutions. In fact, not only can the process of transferring your files be automated, decompressed, changed permissions, and moved, the process of copying and inserting information to a database can also be automated. Using secure versions of the file transfer protocol (such as SSH, SFTP, and SCP) ensures that no one can steal important passwords from your network data streams.

7,CodeUpgrade
How do you upgrade the code in the test phase to a formal product, which will have a great impact on marketing activities and other activities in a specific period of time. Manual code migration from one environment to another is cumbersome and error-prone, which requires close cooperation between developers and system administrators. This allows your developers to use an automated code deployment system to migrate code from one environment to another. Some system administrators use rsync (official homepage:Http://rsync.samba.org/) To implement automated code deployment. If used with the SSH key, the file transmission between hosts can be more secure.

8. Advanced Management
You can automate internal management, restart services, and send maintenance notifications. You can create scripts to clear temporary files, restart your services, and send maintenance and downtime notifications by email. You will find that automating these tasks makes it hard for you to remember what list you need to do on that day. There is no need to put these things in the calendar; let the system process them.

9. Restart
Yes, you can automate the system restart process. Sitting there waiting for the system to restore to normal is just a waste of time. The process should be automated during relatively idle time. Don't worry. If the system does not return to normal within the appropriate time, your automated monitoring system will notify you.

10. malware Scanning
You can scan spyware, malware, viruses, and other harmful programs through automated processes. Using scripts, You can map and mount some drives, scan your file system, interrupt connections when scanning is complete, and clear scan logs for normal files, then, send the scan result to a database or email. When your system runs well and is suitable for you to do these tasks, you do not need to perform these scans manually.

 

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