Discussion on:

Nine traits of the veteran Windows administrator

Seriously, this list is gospel. I am a Windows Admin and every word applies. I have all the respect in the world for traditional SysAdmin but I know many that have no clue what 'an Admin in the Trenches' really goes through on a daily basis.

Let the flaming begin!

The main trait of a veteran Windows Admin (or at least a good one), is that we're efficiency experts. We'll tend toward the solution that is most efficient in terms of time spent (by us and the users), accuracy of the work, and cost to the company.

For example, with point #1, you're right. Most of us won't bother with vi or emacs because there are better choices for Windows. For example, Sapien PrimalScript will help error-check your VBScript code as you type it, offer auto-complete suggestions, automatically include a comment header, maintain a snippet library, etc. Why waste time learning vi or emacs when a purpose-built editor like that makes you more efficient and effective?

For point #3, I think you do us a disservice. When faced with a technical problem, we'll solve it ourselves if we can do so in a reasonable time. If the answer doesn't come quickly, you can bet Google is the next step. No need to reinvent the wheel. If the solution requires a repetitive manual effort, but there are only 3 machines affected, we'll do it manually. The time it would take to script that task would be wasted. But if it's 20, 50, or 500 machines, scripting to the rescue!

I'd also add:

No. 10: We know the difference between our home and work PCs

Because network security is one of our jobs, we realize that what we do on our home PCs and what is acceptable on company PCs is different. We don't bring in cool software from home, because it risks network security (see No. 8) and potentially puts the company at risk for licensing problems. If we need software to do our job, we order it through proper channels. If not, we leave it off our work PCs. We wish everyone did the same, not because it makes our jobs easier (it would) but because it protects everyone. This is one reason we don't trust most of you with administrator access (see No. 2). You may administer your home computer just fine, but corporate networks are different in subtle ways you might not realize (e.g., if the bad guys steal your home banking credentials, you've lost some money... if they steal the company's banking credentials, we could lose the company).

All those definitely apply to being a Windows Admin. We are responsible for the whole chain, from the "Server" being down to the network cable that the user kicked out with their feet.

That describes it perfectly.

I read through the Unix admin list as well. It was a bit of an eye opener to see that Unix admins take opposite approaches to issues. I once had a coworker who had spent most of his career at IBM. When we would have a problem, he would spend days trying to figure out the cause rather than fixing the problem. It took me six months to train him that sometimes we cant fix the initial cause since the cause was probably some Microsoft developer!

As a Windows Admin, I too agree with the points on the list. As somewhat of a perfectionist, I also can identify with a Unix SysAdmin's desire to find the root cause and address it.

The issue becomes one of time/resources: how much time can reasonably be spent determining the root cause of an issue before you say "The heck with it, lets address the symptom". Of course, if the problem is chronic, it then becomes most cost effective to resolve the underlying issue(s)....

Experience gained in the trenches is a great teacher. All aspects of the computing environment, keyboard to firewall and everything inbetween, you end up owning and supporting. Well stated, Mark.

It's why WIndows admins drink so much coffee. You've always to got to be ready to put out the next fire by p**sing on it. Just don't start me on:
1) Late night or weekend working
2) End users
3) End users (needs listing twice)

Most Window Admins are swifting going bald from all the headbanging and hair pulling!

That was the first thing that crossed my mind when I first read the title.

I Agree !

To be honest, I would add this to trait No. 3:

1 - Microsoft Support
2 - Technet Forums
3 - Google Search

How about our own built Knowlledge Base

I believe in reproducible results. I'm not interested in learning a unique solution to every problem. But scripts... how does a real administrator get anything done without them? "You just click on..." may be fine for some people but 4NT, KiXtart, batch files, PSTools, etc. are my best friends. When NT first arrived, I met some of the team and I asked them when the CLI tools from LANMAN were coming back. "Why would you want those?" they asked(!!!). The resource kits came out not to long after that.

Maybe you don't qualify for true MS Windows administratorship. Have you considered a career as a Unix sysadmin?

In my experience, MS Windows admins act almost phobic when it comes to scripting -- including me, before I got into Unixy work, despite the fact that I was eyeball deep in that stuff back in the day when DOS was what I had available to me. When I made the switch to Unix, a whole new world opened up to me.

The problem, I think, is that MS Windows actually provides a hostile environment for admin scripting, and most MS Windows admins rationalize that away by acting like scripting is unnecessary. Well, I suppose it is technically unnecessary, as long as you prefer doing a lot of unnecessary, repetitive work, choosing to fight fires all the time rather than anticipate future fires and automate the solution before it's needed.

I agree with the comment from nkhowland about scripting. The serious Windows Admin VETERAN who doesn't know his way around a batch script isn't either, a serious Windows Admin, or a veteran. Not everything can be accomplished in a GUI, and if I have to do the same thing more than twice, you better bet your boots that I will write a script to do it. I am over worked and I do NOT have time to click through two dozen screens over and over, when I can write a script to do it.

And what VETERAN turns to only Powershell to get scripting done? Powershell has only been a viable option for a couple years, If I am scripting on windows I am probably doing with with a Batch/CMD script, yes sometimes PS or VBS/WSH come into play, but I am not comfortable in PS just yet. We are talking Veterans here, not the little wet behind the ears kids, who wouldn't know a command line if it bit them in the butt!

If you are overworked try scripting your repetitive tasks, maybe you will have more time for the real problems!

Great synopsis of a veteran Windows Admin! Couldn't have summarized it better myself being a vetaran of over 25 years. I might add that if you are a supervisor, train and delegate to subordinates based upon their strengths. Free yourself up to address more challenging issues which may require you to learn something new and expand your horizon.

is it just me that is reading this wrong or....
But I still agree with everyword!

No, it's not just you

That must be veteran Windows admin eye fatigue.

Fixed the two #3s so now it's Nine + Bonus! Sorry -- I was scrambling at the end of the day yesterday. Didn't catch it!

Great list. I dont think this could be more true.

Seems to be reflected in the behavior of many Windows Administrators.

You have some good points and some extra tools, but the truth is that you need ALL the tools ( both in M$ and UNIX/LINUX environments ) to do a professional job.

Your 'tude is why the UNIX/M$ war stays alive after decades...

( I've been on both sides of the UNIX/M$ admin job scene from working on Daytona to Unix S5R4 )

The extra ease of use for LINUX finally arrived with Ubuntu and the last couple of years.

Now there is truly no difference between LINUX and Windows for the end user. Or the rest of the people going up the chain.

When it comes to having to keep 100's or 1,000 of users up and running it pays to be able to go to Google and find a KB article or other fix for your situation quickly and easily becuase 1,000's of other people have had the same problem. It can be like looking for a needle in a hay stack trying to find fixes and patches for Linux....wrote Scott Lagerbom.

This is really sad ... It's not the Windows admin's fault. They do an incredibly difficult job, often with great expertise, class and style. The fault is with the tools they're given.

Microsoft has been borrowing ideas from Unix (and now Linux) for decades, and has usually changed them for the worse. The Windows filesystems are a case in point. Why are my hard disk, DVD, flash and network all on separate "drives"? Wouldn't life be easier if everything was presented to the user as a single, coherent filesystem?

Windows admins rarely write scripts because Windows has never had a decent shell, much less good text-manipulation tools. And the only decent text editor Windows has ever had is vim. Maybe Powershell will fix the shell problem, but I'd rather use bash than learn another Microsoft-proprietary program.

Is the Windows admin too busy fighting aligators to drain the swamp? Too busy rebooting (yet again), to prevent the next ten reboots? In my experience the best *are* interested in postmortems, to the extent they can prevent problem recurrence.

Windows admins are great, God bless 'em. And I don't want their job any more than they want mine.

> Why are my hard disk, DVD, flash and network all on separate "drives"? Wouldn't life be easier if everything was presented to the user as a single, coherent filesystem?

Despite all the polish and pretty colors on the face of MS Windows, you can't really get very far doing anything meaningful without the rusty steel girders showing through. Implementation details should not be visible by default, but in MS Windows they are a lot of the time. By the same token, when those implementation details are not visible by default, you should be able to get to choose to see those implementation details -- but MS Windows often gets that wrong, too.

The same principles apply to programming languages. The Io language is interesting, and can be fun, but too many implementation details show through by default. The same is true of C, as in the case of pointer arithmetic. Meanwhile, VBScript does everything in its power to prevent the programmer from understanding why certain operations are horrifically in efficient, and to prevent the programmer from choosing another way; by contrast, the performance trade-offs between += and << Maybe Powershell will fix the shell problem, but I'd rather use bash than learn another Microsoft-proprietary program. Is the Windows admin too busy fighting aligators to drain the swamp? Too busy rebooting (yet again), to prevent the next ten reboots? In my experience the best *are* interested in postmortems, to the extent they can prevent problem recurrence.

That's not entirely fair. MS Windows makes postmortems extremely difficult to conduct in any detail, thanks to its "you don't need to know that" design philosophy. As a result, it is often much more efficient to go through the same tedious motions to re-solve the same problem a dozen times than to discover the root cause the first time and ensure it never happens again -- if only because, sometimes, the design of the OS prohibits you from discovering the root cause or, if you find it, prohibits you from actually fixing it once and for all.

Under those circumstances, the reasonable thing to do is often to just not worry about draining the swamp. If each reboot for a particular problem takes ten minutes from the moment you decide to reboot to the moment all services are running again, two hours total before the next time you upgrade the OS and the problems change is much more efficient than spending an hour figuring out the problem and discovering there's no way to fix it without violating the EULA -- following which you're going to have to reboot it anyway.

edit: typo

I've a machine that keeps filling it's drive; doesn't crash out but triggers the monitoring software, sticks maxed out for a bit then finally clears itself out. I'd love to have a display of what files are being written when, how big they are and what space is available on the drive as they are written.

spacemonger and a few other snapshot views won't do it. Even search and sort by create/mod date doesn't help. Maybe I can spot it by watching process monitor's graphs if I get a mouse-over at just the right place.

Be intersted to hear if anyone knows of a utility that will tell me what files where written when with the affects on space and writting program included.

You can watch this type of information from the Sysinternals Process Monitor if you know when it starts happening. You can watch only the file activity you want and see its associated process. Don't know of anything that shows all of the information you are looking for with a single utility, but at least it will allow you to identify the culprit.

As ultimitloozer suggests Process Monitor is a good choice. One drawback is the volume of output it produces. It can be reduced by spending some time configuring its exclusion list. Or if you are facile with a good editor you can quickly exclude unrelated records from a large output.

You don't mention how long a space issue event lasts. If it's on the order of a minute or more then I would do the following as a first approach.

Create a script that every 20 seconds:
1) echo %date% %time% >> file
2) runs Sysinternals Pslist >> file
3) runs Sysinternals Du -q -l 1 [target] >> file

Where [target] is either entire drive e.g. c:\
or a dir if the space problem is in a known dir e.g. c:\data

The Pslist data will point to which program is getting CPU
The Du data will show where the space usage is occurring.

After an occurrence or two you can narrow the Du [target]

When really close add to the script a
4) dir /a /s /od [target] >> file

and perhaps comment out the Du

I know from long experience that on any decently performing server such a script will have little detrimental impact on performance.

edit: [target] was missing

It is truer that Unix administrators have a very tough job, and they do it very well, I have seen this a lot but there are some things that need to be clarified here:
Windows Administrators also do a great job and we rarely write scripts because 1. we have tools that we can use to do the same thing or we know where we can find a good tested script and edit it to our needs. Has for Microsoft borrowing ideas from Unix and others, What is wrong in that? In today's world we are constantly influenced by the world around us and Microsoft is no exception. It might sound very strange to you but most of us find things easier with the Windows File System, and if we need a single place to search we just search the entire computer. The number of tools that are available to a Windows Admin is Hugh and growing, almost all of them help people to be more productive. Most Windows Administrators I know have a passion for taking a holistic view and supporting/learning things that help take I.T to the next level in the company. Last but not least do think about the fact that if Unix is the best and I am not denying that, how is it that in 40+ years of development/evolution it is unable to make solid inroads to the desktop segment? A good windows Administrator who is upto date on technology can actually spend time with family and friends as he/she does not need to worry about postmortems but only about the living. A healthy respect for all Operating Systems and their focus areas is a must for all Administrators from all platforms.

> Last but not least do think about the fact that if Unix is the best and I am not denying that, how is it that in 40+ years of development/evolution it is unable to make solid inroads to the desktop segment? A good windows Administrator who is upto date on technology can actually spend time with family and friends as he/she does not need to worry about postmortems but only about the living.

That's amusing.

I was the netadmin for a defense contractor. 85% of the network was Unix-like systems (primarily Mandriva and RedHat at the time), and 65% of my time was spent fighting MS Windows fires, dealing with licensing (yes, we were one of a small percentage of the companies using MS Windows that took pains to be license compliant), and maintaining all the excess third-party BS that was needed to keep the MS Windows systems working properly. The Unix-like systems just ran themselves.

Half of the time I spent dealing with the Unix-like systems was dealing with the problem of ensuring proprietary software the company used would actually run properly on those Unix-like systems -- so even in the relatively rare case of having to do any work with the Unix-like systems, half our problems were still proprietary software issues (mostly Maya for rendering servers).

If it wasn't for the MS Windows issues, they probably would have only needed me part-time, so don't try to tell me a netadmin's life is easier with MS Windows.

Another trait I've found useful is that I try very hard to learn the entire network topology, regardless if I am responsible for it or not. This aides in troubleshooting tremendously. A good windows admin knows more than just windows. Jack of all trades, master of windows!

Additionally, one solid motto that has helped through the years is: Path of least resistance.

Let's face it - these days the veteran Windows Admin is just as focussed on improving their *nix skills as they are their scripts. Virtualization has completely blurred the line and a good admin delves into the hypervisor to understand the inner workings and how to influence them when the time comes. I for one am grateful for the patient Unix admin who took the time to give me a headstart and am the wiser for it.

With all of the new MS products including Powershell cmdlets as a directive, I think #1 is a bit short-sighted. Personally, I couldn't live without Powershell. I guess this is really an extension of #4: "Work smarter, not harder." Sometimes there are tasks that are specific to your organisation, which a Google search won't find, but if you have the knowledge to do it yourself, you are much better prepared IMO.

AMEN! Your preaching to the Choir.

Right on Bro!

This list is something everyone in our profession should show to whomever they report to. Not only does it bring to light the subtle ways that we deal with the end user (be they co-workers or students) but also some of the "behind the scenes" acticities that we MUST keep up with just to keep "their Outlook accounts running smoothly" not to mention just being able to log on to hit the internet, access home directories, etc.

Windows admins are constantly under fire. Everything from outlook to terminal services requires reboots or tool that take for ever to run. If MS fixes this stuff we would be out of a job.

Very well said.

And, just one more thing to add. As supports for our non-IT organisations, we are part of the solution having to deal with all the bugs and threats in the hardware and software worlds.