Logical approaches to troubleshooting

Possibly the hardest thing that we have to do as system administrators is troubleshoot problems. It is one thing to be able to deploy a system initially, but a very different thing to be able to troubleshoot it when things start to go wrong. With systems administration there are so many places where things can go wrong for us; we sit at the nexus of so many technologies and so many possibilities that tracking down the source of issues can be very challenging.

Not surprisingly, experience makes this far easier than anything. The more you get experienced with maintaining and managing systems the more likely you are to be able to quickly feel your way around a system and often just sense what might be wrong when things get tricky. Nothing really trumps just knowing how a system will react when things are healthy and being able to sense what is wrong based on its behavior. Senior diagnosticians are often brought in for exactly this reason. With...