Article oct2006.tar

syslog

Once again, it's time to review the 2006 Sys Admin Editorial Survey results. There's nothing particularly surprising about the results this year, but here are a few highlights:

  • 64% of respondents have been reading Sys Admin for more than 4 years.
  • Amy Rich's "Questions and Answers" column again topped the list of "most useful regular feature".
  • 84% of readers find the articles in Sys Admin technically to be about the right level, 9% find them too technical, and 7% find them not technical enough.
  • The question about years of experience in systems administration breaks down just beautifully with one-third of respondents having 1-5 years experience, one-third having 6-10 years, and one-third having more than 10 years of experience.
  • 42% of respondents work for companies with fewer than 500 employees, and 58% work for companies with 501 or more employees.
Within those organizations, respondents support the following users and operating systems:

  • 25% of respondents support 1-100 users, 40% support 101-500 users, and 32% support more than 500 users.
  • 79% of respondents support Linux, 48% support Solaris, 21% support AIX, 21% MacOSX, 18% BSD, and 18% support HP-UX.
  • On average, survey respondents each administer about 30 servers.
For me, the most fun part about the annual survey process is reading the write-in comments to questions, such as "What do you like most about Sys Admin?" This year's replies included:

  • Not much fluff, very tech oriented
  • Plain simple Linux help
  • Functional (useful) info in articles
  • Perl Advisor
  • Layout and usefulness. It's the only magazine to which I still subscribe!
  • Shell script articles
Things respondents said they didn't like about Sys Admin included:

  • Too much programming
  • Vendor-supplied supplements
  • Not enough BSD coverage
  • New products section
  • Not enough info on different systems each month
  • Not enough time to read it
Remember that one way you can directly affect the future content of Sys Admin is by writing an article on your particular area of expertise. Upcoming themes include open source, clustering, backup and recovery, and security, but we welcome all proposals, comments, and suggestions. Please write to me at: aankerholz@cmp.com or to Rikki at: rendsley@cmp.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely yours,

Amber Ankerholz
Editor in Chief