We had a small group tonight. When I say small I mean really small. All of three people.

We had the normal trivia exchange and then got to a more serious topic - what kind of skill set do you need to be a sysadmin? This could be a topic for a future meeting. Perhaps some kind of skills assessment from everyone? I think I’ll wait and see who comments/brings it up again.

One item I had mentioned was a windows installer that’s linux based and is supposedly a RIS replacement. The project is called unattended. There is another one called ani (automated network installations) which also looks promising. I have not used either, but anything that takes the tedium out of a windows install is good by me.

There is also another project that rolls all the service packs and hotfixes info a single installer package. No, I’m not talking about nlite, but rather autopatcher, which I have used on occasion to keep my aging couple of windows 2000 machines “up to date”. Your mileage may vary, but I still have a few windows boxes I maintain, so items like autopatcher are handy.

Got any favorite tools for helping maintain the farm/office/whatever? Feel free to comment/contribute. I’m a fan of kickstart and jumpstart myself. I need to create a local yum repository and life will be very good.

I know, RPMs - not exactly the best method, but when you are supporting a commercial environment, you use something that actually has support.