The typical day of a typical system administrator consists of handling many tasks such as responding to user requests, responding to management requests, attending meetings pertaining to the response to management and user requests, adding and maintaining accounts, maintaining file systems, maintaining disks and other devices, assisting the network administration team, handling performance, network, and hardware problems, and managing various other ad hoc responsibilities boiling down to firefighting.

This chapter will help you to understand the differences (and similarities) in the life of a system administrator once your cluster is up. The following chapter (Chapter 20) will focus on how network administration differs in a clustered environment, and finally, in Chapter 21, we will present tools for administering the cluster itself (as opposed to administering a system in a cluster).