How many administrators needed per site?

[Mark Verber]

   A while ago, I saw a posting calling for input about how many administrators
   any given site should have.  I believe the poster was going to gather the
   info and publish the stats.  I never caught the results.

I didn't recall seeing the results either.

   Well, due to "budget cutbacks", I am in danger of losing my
   partner/fellow administrator.  It seems they think I'm good
   enough to handle this site all by myself.  I'm flattered, but mostly,
   I'm  panicked.  I don't think that this is a 1-person job. (I have
   ~50 Suns on site and ~15 PC's)

   So to justify my partner's existance, I need to know:
    What's the average administrator-to-machine ratio?

    How about the average administrator-to-USER ratio. Is it different
    from admin:machine?

The administrator to machine ratio that is reasonable depends on what
level of service is expected and what responsibilities the sysadm has.
In addition to these two parameters, there are two other issues that
will temper the equation: (1) Single sysadm sites are not very
desirable (except financially) in most cases.  Is that it is difficult
for a single person to have the breadth of knowledge and experience to
run a really first class operation, no matter how few machine you
have.  There will always be some area that a single person will be
weak on.  It also means that when the sysadm is on vacation, (or gets
run over by a bus) the site is vulnerable.  Carrying a sky-pager on
vacation isn't my idea of fun, and no one can predict when a bus might
strike.  (2) The larger a site is, the less people that are needed
because you can get a good economy of scale.  I have seen at larger
sites at a 1:100 sysadm-to-machines where things ran pretty well,
although more people would have been nice.

I am not sure that there are any hard and fast rules for ratios.  The
thought of administrating 60 Suns that are more or less alike, a
server or three with mainly diskless or dataless clients that are
clones of each other wouldn't scare me.  That is a pretty manageable
task.  You would *need* need to be proactive rather than reactive to
tasks, make use of existing tools or building some for yourself that
permits your work to be multiplied, eg. running something like
rdist,target,sup for automatic updates, setting up backups to run
automatically (how did we ever live without exebytes), etc, etc.

A lot would depend on the level of support your users expect.  The
best way to figure out how many people are needed, it to figure out
what level of service your users expect and whether the environment
helps or hurts the maintainces of software.  Rarely are sysadms doing
only UNIX sysadm tasks.  Here is a list of things that I find myself
doing in addition to the normal "sysadm" tasks like backups, account
installs, OS maintaince, etc.

(1) User Services

How much hand holding is expected?  Some sites have users than are
pretty self-sufficient.  Other sites have users than need their hands
held for everything.  Can yours take care of themselves, or do the
need/want the admin to do the simplest tasks for them.  For example, I
have a friend whose users would demand him to do the most basic
things for them.  Things like moving their files from one directory to
another.  (Anything that wasn't running the text editor and reading
mail was Unix, therefore a job for the adm).  This sort of support
requires something like a 1:2 ratio.

Does the site want you to conduct workshops, prepare extensive local
documentation?  To what extent is the sysadmin expected to consult on
technical issues?  Just using Unix, or other realms.  For example,
lets say your site has heavy users of FrameMaker, TeX, Mathamatica,
Common Lisp, C++, X11, PostScript, and Sybase.  Is the sysadms suppose
to be able to answer detailed questions on all those topics?  One
person can not be an expert on all these things.  Something that
many people don't appreciate is that if someone is to consult on
a topic area, they need some time to play, experiment, and generally
develop in that area.

(2) Diversity of Arch/OS/Setup

Of course, each type of machine (arch/OS) that a site has multiples
the complexity of the support task, especially if your users expect
all machines to behave identically.  Each install program will have
to be installed N times.  OS upgrades will have to be done at least
once by hand for each arch/OS, etc, etc.

Workstations can be arranged in ways that make it easier, or harder to
do distributed administration on.  If you can configure all your
workstations to use the identical configuration, and have identical
tools, etc, it is easy to support a larger number of machines.  If
each your machines is configured differently: swap sizes different,
some diskless, some dataless, some diskful, with different software
installed, etc. you are going to have headaches.  If you can have one
'prototypical' machine that you can clone from, installs, upgrades,
etc can be done pretty easily/automatically.  For example, lets say
you run a dataless configuration with /, /var, and parts of /usr on a
local disk, and everything else accessed via an automounter.
Your could have a diskless partition on a server that would boot
up, install SunOS on a disk, do your local customizations, and reboot
as a newly configured workstation ready for action just by editing
your ethers file and a configuration file.  If you have to do each
machine by hand, you will have to waste a lot of times every time you
install a new machine or have to do an OS upgrade.

(3) Software Support?

How much PD/freeware software do people want installed, and what level
of support are they expecting?  Just compiling and installing software
doesn't take much time, but often times (and rightly so) a sysadm is
expected not only to compile and install new software, but to test the
software before people get at it, to debug any problems, port it if
necessary, and be a general expert.  This takes time which varies with
the quality and complexity of the software.  Keeping a current version
of kermit or perl isn't hard (I wish everyone did as nice a job as
Larry has with perl), keeping ontop of g++ takes a quite a bit more
time.

(4) Custom Software?

Most places not only expect the sysadms to keep the world running, but
create tools for the user population when needed.  This is
understandable, especially in small site where the sysadm might be the
decent programmer.  If there is this expectation, time must be given
for the development process.

(5) Site Planning/Admin Overhead

How much site planning is the sysadm expected to handle.  Are you
going to have to know about AC/heating loads and power?  How much
paperwork is there?

(6) Hardware/Network Maintaince

Who crawls through the ceiling to pull wires?  How finds the flaky
transceiver when the ethernet starts to go crazy?  When a terminal or
workstation dies do you just call your vendor and wait, or are more
creative solutions required.  Do you buy all of your peripherals ready
to install, or do you save money by purchasing components and do the
integration yourself?  All of these things take time.

(7) Leading Technology

Is the sysadm suppose to anticipate new technology and advise the
company as to where they might like to take there environment?
Most places I have been, the syadm were expected to have a good feel
for what was state of the art and what was looking promising.  Not
just products, but research.  Keeping up with what is going isn't
easy.  trade rags can give you a picture of what is being sold, but
they aren't particularly good at helping people to anticipate what
might be in a year or three.  Forward looking is often necessary given
many sites have a 2-5 year planning and/or depreciation schedule.

Cheers,
Mark