Chapter 11: Troubleshooting

Few things are as challenging in systems administration as troubleshooting when problems have risen. Troubleshooting is hard at the best of times, but as system administrators our job is almost always to troubleshoot a system that is either currently running in production and has to remain functional while we attempt to fix some aspect of it or is currently down and we have to get it back up and running in production as quickly as possible. The ability to work at a reasonable pace without the business losing money actively as we do so typically does not exist for us or when it does, is the exception rather than the rule. Troubleshooting is hard, critical, and stressful.

Troubleshooting involves more than just fixing an obvious technical problem, applying business logic is critical as well. We have to understand our troubleshooting in the greater context of the workload and the business and apply more than simple technical know-how. There is fixing a problem...