Introduction

You've spent hours pouring over UNIX vendor specifications and benchmarks. Managers, system administrators and accountants have gone over the various vendors ' specs and weighed them against your company's needs and the costs. Finally, everyone agreed and selected the right computer for the right price.

You attended System Administration training courses prior to the system's delivery, giving you time to brush up on your skills, possibly learning some of the intricacies of a newer release of the operating system.

The vendor delivered the system, provided installation assistance, and gave you some additional hints on how to get the most from your system.

Since going online, you have been monitoring the system's performance and following advice from a good performance tuning book. You have fine- tuned your system for optimum performance during the periods of heaviest use and have even found some wins during lighter use.

Combining your programming skills and your system administration experience, you have utilized the cron daemon well. Backups are fully automated, system log files are regularly rotated and trimmed , and /etc/syslog.conf has been modified to suit your needs. You've programmed your system to nearly maintain itself, while letting you know when it needs your help, thus limiting the amount of time you have to babysit it.

The system has become a well-oiled machine, thanks to all of your time and effort. You've done well and the machine has been running like a champ for quite some time now. The users are happy and management is happy. You can put your feet up on the desk and rest now or move onto your next major project.

The phone rings and you answer. A user says his terminal is dead. As soon as you hang up, you receive another call and another complaint about no response from the computer. Ignoring the next call, you get to the computer console just in time to see the word "Panic" scroll off the top of the screen. Another message says something about "dumping," and now the system appears to be rebooting itself.