Yesterday's entry raises an obviousquestion: why don't people automate things ahead of time, before theyhave so many systems that they have to automate or die?

The simple answer is that it is easier for them not to automate thanit is for them to automate. But why is it that way?

There are at least two reasons:

• there is pretty much no standard way to automate things at thevarious levels, especially across different Unixes and platforms.This means that you have to build an automation

Over the time I've worked in system administration, I've observed acommon pattern that I will summarize this way:

As your system count grows, you wind up automating the automation.

Here is the levels that I've seen people (myself included) go through:

• managing systems by hand, one by one.
• using tools that let you run a command on all of your systems orclasses of your systems.
• automating things for clusters, so that you don't have to explicitlyrun commands on