Systems Administration

---
name: systems-administration
description: Runs servers and corporate systems — patching, configuration baselines, change control, capacity, and the routine that prevents incidents. Use this to establish a patching cadence, standardize server configuration, plan a maintenance window, decide change control for infrastructure, or clean up systems that have drifted from any known state.
---

# Systems administration

Well-run systems are boring. The work is in the routine that keeps them that way, and almost every
serious incident traces back to a routine that was skipped.

Cloud environment design belongs to `technology:cloud-infrastructure`; this is operating the systems
the company runs on.

## Configuration baselines and drift

Every system class needs a defined baseline: build, hardening, agents, logging, accounts. Systems
built by hand from memory diverge immediately and cannot be reasoned about as a group.

Drift is the real enemy. Detect it continuously and correct rather than document — a system that no
longer matches its baseline is a system whose behavior under patching or failover is unknown.

The strongest form is disposability: rebuild rather than repair. A system you can rebuild in an hour
never accumulates the sediment of a decade of manual fixes.

## Patching as a cadence

Set a regular, predictable window and hold it. Ad hoc patching means patching happens when someone
worries, which is never in proportion to actual risk.

Tier by exposure: internet-facing systems on the shortest cycle, then internal, then isolated.
Emergency patching is a separate path with its own authority, used for actively exploited
vulnerabilities — `security:vulnerability-management` decides what is urgent, this skill executes it.

Track **coverage**, not activity. "Patching is running" is not an answer; "97% of servers are within
30 days, here are the twelve that are not and why" is.

## Change control proportionate to risk

Heavyweight approval for trivial changes produces circumvention, and circumvention produces
unrecorded changes, which is worse than no process.

Tier it: standard pre-approved changes, normal changes with review, emergency changes with
after-the-fact record. Every change needs an owner, a back-out plan, and a record — the back-out plan
being the part most often assumed rather than written.

Maintenance windows exist to make disruption predictable. Announce them, keep them, and finish inside
them.

## Know what you have

An unmanaged system is a system nobody patches. Reconcile what is running against
`it-operations:it-asset-management` regularly, and treat anything unaccounted for as urgent — the
server nobody owns is the one still running an unsupported operating system.

## Never

- Repair a drifted system without correcting the baseline that let it drift.
- Patch on worry rather than cadence.
- Make a change with no back-out plan.
- Leave a discovered unmanaged system unclaimed.