Highly Automated Low Personnel System Administration
in a Wall Street Environment
Harry Kaplan
Sanwa Financial Products Co., L.P.
Abstract
Administering a small system running intensive financial
applications with the demand for twenty four hour coverage is
nearly impossible for a single person. Moreover, most solutions
to automated system administration are not clever enough to
pinpoint the problem and deliver the required action to the
responsible person in a timely manner. Our system evolved by
integrating small utilities which function as information
gathering tools, notifying tools and action tools. Vital
information to us means: the users on each system, load on each
server, temperature in the computer room, remaining swap and UNIX
file system space on each machine in the company, health of our
market data ticker plant, and state of backup tapes. Notifying
tools include electronic mail, electronic postit notes, a
digitized dial-up voice messaging system, and alphanumeric
pagers. Action tools include fairly standard UNIX utilities such
as killing runaway application processes, removing core dumps,
and, as such, require little further description.
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