 syslog
Sociologists say that after major changes (such as national elections,
company layoffs, or big career moves) people spend less money and
eat more comfort food like mashed potatoes until the anxiety of the
change wears off. Here at Sys Admin, however, we seem to thrive
on change and live on chocolate and caffeine. Our sales manager jokes
that we're crisis-motivated, and he's probably right. However,
not unlike systems administrators, we like to plan ahead as well as
put out fires.
One tool that helps us plan ahead is our reader survey. Sys
Admin will soon be mailing a reader survey to a randomly selected
group of subscribers; and if you're one of the lucky ones to
receive it, I hope you will take the time to fill it out. This survey
helps us understand what you're doing in your jobs, so we can
better serve your needs within the magazine. We'd like to know,
for example, what hardware and software you use and how you use
it, how often you write your own code, how many users you support,
and how you prefer to get the training and information needed to
enhance your careers. Through past surveys, we've found that
you get most of your training from publications (we hope that means
Sys Admin), informal training at work, and attending conferences
or seminars. We've also found that you're most interested
in security articles -- with performance tuning and system-monitoring
articles close behind. We'll tally the results of the new survey
and let you know how things have changed.
Of course, the survey also asks a lot of questions about the magazine
itself, such as: which columns are most valuable to you, and how
can we make the Web site more useful to you? According to last year's
results, you like the Q&A, Net Admin, and Perl Advisor columns
best, and you also find product reviews helpful. Because you've
told us that backups are another important topic to you, this issue
contains a number of backup-related articles. Clark Cooper shows
how to back up and restore Linux and Solaris machines with a couple
of shell scripts; Ben Diamond and Keil Wurl explain the use of ufsdump
to perform a full backup and restore; and Shawn Bayern takes a minimal,
one-script approach to backup using an extra hard drive.
Please note that you don't have to wait to receive a survey
to tell me what you like or dislike about the magazine. You can
write to me anytime with suggestions or comments. I look forward
to hearing from you.
Sincerely yours,
Amber Ankerholz
Editor in Chief
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