In the world of the systems administrator, everyone that doesn’t setup the system or tune the operating system is a user. This is just a simple statement of fact, it doesn’t matter what you do with the system – if you didn’t build the box, or if you don’t get right down into the “nitty gritty” of the system you are just an other user. Obviously this is at odds with the way that the users think, the database administrators think of themselves as administrators but in reality they are just users to the systems admins. This isn’t meant to be derogatory in any way, the same is true of the people who have access to some of the other privilegedaccounts on the systems. They only administer a small part of the whole system, normally it relates to an application. To clarify the situation a little, each of these applications – and yes Oracle is an application as far as a systems administrator is concerned. Has to reside on the server and fulfill a function, there are many interdependency’s to consider and that is also the job of the systems administrator. We look at the server as a whole, not each application in isolation. This generally means that we’re less prone to utterances like, “well my application is working fine” or the imortal “I think that you have a problem”.

I’ve seen these in the software!

In general the view of the systems administrator is that “we” have a problem, this distinction is quite important – users tend to think along the lines of the I’m the “only” user and where is “my” systems administrator. Whereas your average  systems administrator sees the bigger picture, in fact he mostly thinks the users are mucking up “my” system and causing me problems. There is an old systems administrator saying, “this would be a great job if there were no users” a bit of a strange saying but it does sum up how many systems administrators feel. Over the past month a great deal of effort has gone into planning a baseline build that will please all the parties involved, the users, both general and privileged. The security team, the auditors, the DBA’s and not least the systems administrators and at long last we seem to have arrived at that point.

In order to move forward we need to work with the users in a more in depth way over the next couple of months, I’m sure that we can achieve what we set out to do at the beginning of the project, the target is the relocation of all the applications to Europe. The target completion date is before the end of the year, to acomplish this we will require that all the users become more understanding of each other’s requirements – this as it turns out is where the plan starts to fall down. Trying to force the users down a certain route probably won’t work, it’s more likely that the stubborn streak will come through and little or nothing will be achieved. Still once the servers are in Europe, the maintenance and upgrade cycles in our European data center will be the order of the day. The twice a year mandatory patching events will be interesting, as will the interesting noise’s that the understanding users will make – still they’ll become Understanding Users – Or not……