This document discusses changing from a sysadmin mindset focused on manual, repetitive tasks to a more collaborative, proactive, and communicative mindset using configuration management tools. It notes common problems with the old approach like fixing issues directly in production and lack of documentation. It advocates using tools to codify server configurations, applying changes systematically, and improving communication. The new mindset focuses on collaboration over acting as a "superman," being proactive by providing ideas, and being communicative by explaining changes made through coding.

1. How Do I Change My
Sysadmin Mindset?
GNOME Asia 2015
Dwi Sasongko Supriyadi

2. What is Sysadmin?
System Administration is the blanket title for a myriad of job responsibilities involving the management of information
systems and/or services. We choose to refer to it as a “blanket title” because the responsibilities are broad and can
differ from organization to organization. In some organizations, it even differs from group to group!
System Administration is often referred to as “operations” or “ops” too - you might have guessed that though, having
decided to enroll in Ops School.
- http://ops-school.readthedocs.org/en/latest/sysadmin_101.html

3. https://blog.opendns.com/2012/07/10/sysadmin-caption-contest-top-10-can-you-do-better/

4. My Experience
- Developer
- System Admin
- Quality Engineer
- Dev/Ops

5. Common Problem
- Production issues are usually fixed in
production, directly, by hand …
- It’s hard to remember changes
- It’s hard to do repetitive tasks, and
sometimes it’s just not possible to Rsync it
- It’s hard to communicate
- It’s hard when everyone is so stupid to
understand

6. Common Issue
- Imagine that you have to maintain 1000 servers
- You need to patch OpenSSL
- You're not going to do it manually one by one
- You need to make sure that your patch won't break
anything

7. Code It!
- Configuration Management Tools
- Keep your servers’ setting in a repository
- You have the full knowledge of your system
- You keep the system state
- Change the code, test, then apply to your production
- Improve communication

8. Code It!

9. Code it!
$ sudo apt-get install git mtr vim
zip htop make iotop iperf ngrep
strace curl wget

10. System Lifecycle

11. Everything nowadays required to be
efficient
- More SEC findings
- Systems need to scale in the speed of light
- Systems have to be “AGILE” too
- Systems have to be mature enough before
“SCALABLE”
- More and more and more and more
“HOTFIX”

12. The Mindset
- Collaborative
- Collaboration instead of “I’m the superman!”
- Proactive
- Give out ideas, instead of “I won’t fix your computer”
- Communicative
- Explain, code, instead of “Don’t touch production!”
- Articulative
- Explain, use pictures if required

13. Want More?
ruckuus@gmail.com
https://github.com/ruckuus