Ten reasons to pay for sysadmin’s consulting
From my personal experience of communication with clients, I’d divide all issues applied with into three categories:
• Server setup
• Basic server tuning
• Further exploitation
For each particular issue in a category there’s a moment when sysadmin’s help would be very reasonable and helping avoid mistakes, increase server power and decrease latency. I discovered nine reasons applicable to these categories and wrote the tenth, bonus reason, which doesn’t apply to them.
1. You want to solve non-standard task: browser game, scandinavian auction, multivideo conference, banner network, etc. Sysadmin’s assistance here would be informing you of technologies that would work best in this case and how to organize horizontal project expansion.
2. You want to buy server without having an idea which would be the best one for your needs. Sysadmin will help you here by choosing optimal configuration depending on current option availability. He will choose machine with all components to be equally loaded to exclude the “bottle neck” issue.
3. You bought a server and it results with new questions - which OS would be better to install, how to install HD, if it’s worth making RAID and which would work best for you, which file system to use and if you need LVM. For instance, sysadmin would advice you not to use RAID-5 for 3 hard drives that you had no idea about.
4. Server is installed and its basic tuning is critically important. Which would work better - fresh software with unknown errors or older software with fewer features, but permanent stability? How many resources should you apply to web, how many resourses should there be for Data Base? How to adjust IMAP (outgoing mail) not to be marked as spam? Sysadmin would install everything, tune spf, domain keys, how-to reverse ptr and a lot more of “scary terms” to make your server work fast and stable.
5. It’s of high importance to stress test your machine and all of its separate parts to realize where problems could appear - whether with ajax or deadlock issues when upgrading bases. A lot of valuable suggestions will follow log analysis.
6. Something’s gone wrong when project started. System’s been acting strangely and determining of the exact issue is vital. Slow DB applications, unknown POST data kills the script, application delay, sudden connect breaks. With the help of debug mode sysadmin works on detailed statistics to determine exact issue.
7. All of a sudden your project becomes very popular. Your server is either permanently loaded by thousands members using chat, or watched by search engines indexing something, or ten new threads per each second are created on your forum. What’s the right solution - code optimization, ram purchasing or fast drives? Or, it might be a sign to replace your server with the new one? Your sysadmin will help you find accurate answers.
8. Popularity causes issues. High load might gradually grow into DDoS. Who’d be able to help you more than your sysadmin? He knows how project works, he knows server vulnerability and how to ban botnet.
9. Someone could hack you through software vulnerabilities - xss, upload a picture with running php code from comments, upload and run exploits. Sysadmin can help you protect your sites from popular attacks, record hackers’ IP addresses, their actions and, oh goodness, help you find who’s guilt this is!
10. Bonus advice: You want to thank your sysadmin once again. At least installation he made a year ago worked with no issues. It’s so simple - to say “thank you”. Sysadmin work is often taken for granted and it’s wrongly thought that server works on its own. It’s a great pleasure to know we are thought about.
My name is Andrey Rogovsky and I Linux & FreeBSD sysadmin. You may visit my CV page: esupport.org.ua