Day in the life of a Mac sysadmin....

[ianmb]

Hi folks,

I'm not sure if this has been done before....

I thought it'd be interesting to hear from others wrt how you spend you spend your working days. As I am fairly new to the Mac sysadmin scene, some of you may identify things that I should be doing :-)

Looking for things along the lines of; How does your typical day run? Do you work to a daily/weekly/monthly checklist? What are your highest priorities? What would you like to be doing, but never have the time
for? How much time do you devote to maintenance (what sort?), security, administration etc.?

Looking forward to your responses!

[michaelmcgaw]

Good post, @ianmb!

I'm in the same position being a new Mac sysadmin. What might also be useful is to know some of the web resources you experienced sysadmins use on a regular basis in your job.

[dpertschi]

Ok, I'll play along…

Keep in mind "Mac sysadmin" is a hugely broad title. Context in scope of responsibility is key for comparison sake.

Managed service provider, commercial global business ops, operating as a Tier 3 engineer, SME, with sole responsibility for clients Casper application and infrastructure (1100 clients, 15 DPs), client OS image design/development/deployment, software packaging/deployment, patch management, escalated user support, project management.

Start 8AM

Spend an hour caffeinating while scanning my preferred news sites (MacIntouch, MacRumors, MacEnterprise, Twitter). You've got to keep up on what's going in the industry. Are you aware of and keeping an eye on the news about the FREAK flaw?

Respond to e-mails, and dive deeper into current JAMFnation discussions that interest me.
"ohh look, now Oracle is screwing us over"; re-read Rich's articles and test in my environment.

Spot check current patch management policy logs for failures or anomalies.

Handle emergencies escalated from colleagues and/or client, consult, advise.

Casper upgrade project finally kicking off; fill down time with project planning activity: test profile usage on dev box, refine Yosemite deployment work flow/configurations.

Patch management report due tomorrow: pull stats and forward to Security.

Every month right after patch tuesday: define and develop patch policies and scope/pilot/deploy/monitor.

Occasionally write documentation for the desktop support staff. Yesterday it was a 4 pager on configuring and using the MS OneDrive application.

Knock off around 5PM, give or take of course, not always my choice. Some days I'm driving, other days I'm along for the ride. Evenings and weekend: ahhh Yeah!, as needed.

[ronb]

My Story (and I'm sticking to it) -

Start 8AM

Caffeination while scanning preferred news sites (Mac Rumors, Apple World Today, Daring Fireball, Yahoo Tech, JAMF Nation). Always on the look out for security concerns

Catch-up with email

Check for new major application updates available (Microsoft, Adobe in our case). Also check on Java and Flash updates

Check email

Monitor JSS Dashboard for errors, status of policies (we general cache all installations). On Fridays, Check on installations of cached policies (we have a Thursday policy that does system updates, installs all cached policies, maintenance routines at log-out) that ran the evening before.

Check email

Meetings, support tickets - all spread throughout the day every day

Check email

More java

Check email

Hopefully out around 5, but not yet to a Tesla Model S. Maybe by the time X or 3 ships.