| Network and system administration is a branch of engineering that concerns the operational management of human–computer systems. It is unusual as an engineering discipline in that it addresses both the technology of computer systems and the users of the technology on an equal basis. It is about putting together a network of computers (workstations, PCs and supercomputers), getting them running and then keeping them running in spite of the activities of users who tend to cause the systems to fail.
A system administrator works for users, so that they can use the system to produce work. However, a system administrator should not just cater for one or two selfish needs, but also work for the benefit of a whole community. Today, that community is a global community of machines and organizations, which spans every niche of human society and culture, thanks to the Internet. It is often a difficult balancing act to determine the best policy, which accounts for the different needs of everyone with a stake in a system. Once a computer is attached to the Internet, we have to consider the consequences of being directly connected to all the other computers in the world.
In the future, improvements in technology might render system administration a somewhat easier task – one of pure resource administration – but, today, system administration is not just an administrative job, it is an extremely demanding engineer’s job. It’s about hardware, software, user support, diagnosis, repair and prevention. System administrators need to know a bit of everything: the skills are technical, administrative and socio-psychological.
The terms network administration and system administration exist separately and are used both variously and inconsistently by industry and by academics. System administration is the term used traditionally by mainframe and Unix engineers to describe the management of computers whether they are coupled by a network or not. To this community, network administration means the management of network infrastructure devices (routers and switches). The world of personal computers (PCs) has no tradition of managing individual computers and their subsystems, and thus does not speak of system administration, per se. |