System Admin Maxim #3: Do things right the first time

A system admin often has conflicting priorities which can make it hard to do something correctly and easy to take shortcuts.  I have found in my career that taking shortcuts inevitability causes me pain down the road.

John Wooden Quote

John Wooden really hits the nail on the head.  As a system admin you are always busy, so when will you have time to redo something.  A few examples of this maxim are:

• Setting up separate accounts for each service added to your infrastructure.  It is much easier to use a single account than to create new accounts when you are in a rush.  The problem is this is a major security risk that will come back to cause problems. For example, you do this and then 5 years later you remove the account thinking it was only used for service A and forgetting that you set up service B on it also.  This is made worse, because service B is only used once a quarter so when you delete the account in January, you do not find out until March that things are broken.
• You need a script for a quick task so you just write up something quick without following the coding standards. 10 years later you are trying to figure out why things broke with the script and it has no documentation about how it works.
• You are in a rush and do not update the system's change log in February.  Something breaks in December and you spend most of your Christmas holidays figuring out that the undocumented change in February broke the once a year processing that happens in December.
• You set up systems, but do not test them regularly.  For example, you set up a Backup system and do not do test restores once a week or month.  Another example is you set up a process to recover from a power outage and do not test it for a few years.  Well, your infrastructure has changed over those years and your process is not out of date.  The time to find this out is not during the disaster, but before it during a test.

It is not always possible given time contraints to do every thing right the first time, but you need to be aware that every single time you break this maxim you are mortgaging your future with technical debt that will need to be paid back.