5 things sysadmin can do comfortably over the holiday season

(and 3 they absolutely shouldn’t!)

HO HO HO It’s beginning to look a lot like… Christmas season. Empty office, silence in the corridor, and no frustrating questions from your non-IT colleagues. The ideal time for sysadmins when they can…

1. Tune your monitoring tool, review alerts, add nagging problems to be monitored

2. Update the documentation

3. Do a security audit

4. Complete some IT housekeeping tasks*

5. Take a course or read a book you’ve been thinking about

DON’T

1. perform firmware updates or major maintenance activities — vendors will be at half staff, so you risk disrupting someone else’s holiday if something blow’s up
2. reboot any server, especially if it’s out of warranty or runs on an old OS
3. break anything

And you, what are your plans for this time?

*Examples of IT housekeeping tasks: integrate a series of scripts into a single one, review sudoers files on all of the boxes, schedule backups for appliance VMS that can only backup to an internal FTP server, check Intune config