Chris's Wiki :: blog/sysadmin/AlwaysMakeAChecklist Commentshttps://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/AlwaysMakeAChecklist?atomcommentsDWiki2023-04-12T16:24:02ZRecent comments in Chris's Wiki :: blog/sysadmin/AlwaysMakeAChecklist.By Chris Siebenmann on /blog/sysadmin/AlwaysMakeAChecklisttag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/AlwaysMakeAChecklist:05437c5186ac9fb18720243398c8fb471e346a7bChris Siebenmann<div class="wikitext"><p>There are significant tradeoffs between automation and checklists.
One of them is that <a href="https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/ChecklistsVsAutomation">in automation, you have to explicitly add
checks for things going wrong, while with checklists you can to
some extent rely on people for that</a>.
Optimistic, dangerous automation can be somewhat easy to write,
but good automation is much harder. Checklists can often be
reasonably written in advance as a one-off, but generally you
don't do automation that way; automation is most usually aimed
at being reusable.</p>
</div>2023-04-12T16:24:02ZBy Nathan Grennan on /blog/sysadmin/AlwaysMakeAChecklisttag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/AlwaysMakeAChecklist:cfd5f58b54cd2dd8f6d85e23d4c093fbdd8cd9e1Nathan Grennan<div class="wikitext"><p>A counter point is anytime you find yourself thinking about checklists, think about automation instead. Checklists are like HOWTOs. Automation like scripts, configuration management tools, etc are more repeated-able and take human error out. Not to say like all software they too can't be buggy, but with time nad work you can often mostly factor out the bugs.</p>
</div>2023-04-08T16:45:18ZBy Ben Cotton on /blog/sysadmin/AlwaysMakeAChecklisttag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/AlwaysMakeAChecklist:564b41d2c487ce2bbeed495b4d29a71dd7c565daBen Cottonhttps://funnelfiasco.com<div class="wikitext"><p>I feel this. I botched some software RAID work a few years ago, which ended up leading to re-installing my desktop/server. On the plus side, I figured "well, I might as well use this as an opportunity to put all of the configuration in Ansible". I'd been putting off using configuration management for a decade or so at that point.</p>
</div>2023-01-24T14:59:18ZBy Tom Yates on /blog/sysadmin/AlwaysMakeAChecklisttag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/AlwaysMakeAChecklist:b19743a515f6b8e59fb1ad2623a0285f2c974183Tom Yateshttps://www.teaparty.net<div class="wikitext"><p>God bless you for this posting. I usually make checklists for sysadmin work, and I know for a fact how life-saving they can be, but I still often find poor justifications for not doing it "this time". Formal recognition that it's not just me, that it's really best-practice, will help me to do that less in future.</p>
</div>2023-01-24T09:29:03Z