Automation in System Administraton – are you a middle level unix admin? it is for you.

What is Automation?

Automation is nothing but performing system administration tasks without manual interventions, and complete the operations using specific tools/programs/scripts.

Example: Writing a script to backup the data from one server and run it using cron scheduler on every night.

Why the Automation is important for System Administrators?

My experience says ” if you ask a system admin to delete a single file from a set of 100 servers by login into each server one by one, he will be having 90% chances to make at least one human mistake during his task. And the mistake is not because of the person’s technical incompetence but it is because of natural human behavior called fatigue”.  The Sysadmins are more prone to this fatigue when they are involved in such manual repeated work during their routine job.

If you look at the career cycle of a system administrator, for the first 3 to 5 years most of the SAs will spend more amount of time in performing system admin tasks manually. During initial stage of career it will be fun to make every change manually and to have hands on experience for the complex tasks, but as experience grows the amount of work needs to performed also grows. And as a senior system administrator in an enterprise Unix environment our life never going to be easy unless we know how to make our work easy by avoiding repetitive manual tasks with the help of scripts/programs/tools.

In terms of competition in system administration careers, for first 5 years of career you can easily compete with other sysadmins with the help of your technical competence and problem resolution skills. but after 5 years of system admin experience it is difficult to compete with other champs of same experience with just regular system admin skills. The only skill that takes you out of the crowd is “your ability to simplify the job, and the time you are spending to complete a complex job on large set of servers” .. and the simplification of job only possible with your ability to automate the job.

What tasks can be automated?

1. Software Installation tasks: System admin tasks such as installation of software which are having some predefined  per-install and post-install tasks.

2. Server Health check tasks :  System Admin  tasks such as ‘verifying disk space usage, device health status and checking for other error logs’ are common tasks that needs to performed on daily basis.

3. Configuration Changes for large set of servers: Tasks such as modifying configuration files for making simple configuration changes.

4. Remote administration tasks: Performing System admin tasks for remote servers without entering into the server manually to each server.

5. Quality/Security Auditing tasks for Server environment: Tasks such as verifying current configuration for large of number of server and generating a simple reports for quality auditing purpose.

How to Automate the System Admin Tasks?

We can implement automation in system administration tasks using below components:

1. Scripts – Scripts are programs created using languages that can directly interact with operating system using operating system native commands.

We have several different scripting languages in use now and most popular scripting languages are   .. Shell Scripting, Perl Scripting , Python Scripting .. etc.

            — Shell scripting is useful for the sysadmin tasks which are less interactive and more operating system oriented. To get proficiency in shell scripting sysadmin must have a good understanding of the Operating System commands and their arguments. And also should have good hands on knowledge of the task that we want to automate.

         — Perl / Python scripting is more useful for the system admin tasks which are more interactive, dynamic in nature and requires more level of data processing. Proficiency in Perl/Python can make you real awesome administrator and highly valuable member of the team.

2. Job Scheduler: In automation, the first challenge is creating appropriate scripts to perform specific tasks and the second challenge is executing them in a specific time without has manual intervention.  And UNIX provides “CRON” scheduler utility for the purpose of automated job execution.

3. E-Mail setup :  Server e-mail system is useful to let the executing scripting to send you the script outputs in the form of email.

4. Password less remote authentication Setup:  It is common practice in larger environment to configure some servers as special privileged servers (and highly secured and monitored) which are having access to every other server in the environment without using the password. This kind of setup will allow sysadmins to perform complex tasks on large number of systems, within short amount of time.

 I will be discussing more practical automation techniques and scripts in my upcoming posts, until then drop  your comments on this post.