Realistic administration duties

HI experienced admins,

I'm hoping that some of you can outline the scope of your duties.

I was hired six months ago as an Oracle DBA. They then said, oh, you get to do the Unix admin too.

We have a very complex and unstable application on the web. What I actually spend most of my time doing is administering this awful application. There are 14 different pieces of software involved in this one app! They have plans to make it even more complex!

As a result, the real DBA, and Unix admin duties, such as backups (!!!!) are not being tended to, or even looked at properly.

In most of my previous positions, the Unix admins, and the DBAs were not very closely associated with the app. They mostly kept the servers and databases running. (At one shop, any simple request (chmod) had to be put in paper writing!) Senior developers, operations, or managers administered the application.

However, all this has been thrown at me. I don't have time to read and research properly all the issues that I need to deal with. (Thanks to all of you for answering my postings.) It really burns me out.

I'm wondering:
- how would you describe the typical duties of a Unix admin,
or a DBA? What parts are the most fundamental?

• how involved are you administrators with administering your company's app?
• do you know in depth all the other development tools, Java, ColdFusion, Perl, HTML, the awful workflow system that you bought, etc.?

Thanks for reading.

Argosy

Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy. Received on Sun Aug 06 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT