System administration week

by Karel Thönissen

This week we have had our systems administration week. After a year of service our PCs had become ripe for a complete re-installation of all software. This practice has a number of advantages: all software and spyware that is no longer needed is removed from disk and registry, the disk is defragemented, all machines in our organisation are brought to an identical state which makes system administration a lot simpler, we are forced to make decent backups of all data on all machines, and finally, we are forced to use our installation procedure.

Later this week I will write about my experiences during the complete re-installation of all machines. Let me tell you at this stage that there was no reason to become optimistic about our profession.

Experience tells that the order in which software packages are installed can be significant. I have also learned the hard way that certain preferences can only be set during the initial installation of the software or during the installation of the OS. Setting the preferences at a later stage is sometimes not possible or so difficult, that it has become utterly impossible. We have written these experiences down in a protocol. This protocol tells us how to re-install the entire machine, its peripherals and the software applications. Fortunately, our protocol worked, so although a complete re-install can take as long as a complete day (however, much of this time you can do other work), it requires no puzzling.