Proposals

So you don't have a sysadmin yet...

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Proposal
Cooking
Short form
osb2009-0258
Session notes

Excerpt

Many startups underestimate the importance of a systems administrator very early on in the company's development. But maybe you're just not there yet. If you don't have a sysadmin, what is the minimum you should know to squeeze by in the meantime?

Description

Many startups underestimate the importance of a systems administrator very early on in the company’s development. This person not only can make sure your systems are up, but can create the policies and toolsets that your developers, and even your non-techies, will use from the start, avoiding a whole bag of pain and woe down the road when your ad-hoc systems become untenable.

But maybe you’re just not there yet. If you don’t have a sysadmin, what is the minimum you should know to squeeze by in the meantime?

  • What are the “hot spots” on a web server that are going to need attention?
  • What are some good ways to protect yourself against data loss?
  • What are some easy things you can do to avoid getting hacked?
  • How should you go about finding a sysadmin when the time is right?
  • What kinds of things should they be working on when they get started?

Tags

systems administration, sysadmin, business, startups, developers, systems

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Speaker

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    Justin Miller

    Code Sorcery Workshop, LLC

    Biography

    Justin founded Code Sorcery Workshop, LLC in 2006 as a development and systems administration consulting firm and Mac & iPhone software shop. Prior to that, in 1999 Justin was the founding systems administrator of Voxel Dot Net, currently a successful, industry-leading web hosting company with a history of giving back to the open source community. In 2001, Justin was the first systems administrator for HostRocket.com, also currently a successful leader in the web hosting industry. In 2004, Justin became the founding systems administrator for EchoDitto, an internet strategy firm with clients such as the United Nations World Food Programme, Rosie O’Donnell, World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, Rock The Vote, American Civil Liberties Union, and a guy named Barack Obama back before you heard of him. Justin regularly contributes to the Drupal content management system and has recently spoken at Drupalcon in Washington, DC.

    Find Justin online at codesorcery.net or as @incanus77 on Twitter.