Network Administration Thermodynamics

In the human network, administrators struggle to understand those they serve (managers and users) and live at peace in their network. At times, it becomes necessary to expand administrators' universe of hardware and software to include the sciences of thermodynamics and chemistry to increase their powers of survival. Network administrators have to hone their compression skills if they hope to live with the state of constant flux that exists in IT departments. Compression skills allow administrators to collect large amounts of information, compress it and extract what is required to solve a problem. Compression also enables the administrator to use other people's knowledge and experiences to solve problems they themselves have. Notice the common theme? Problem solving.

A valuable aid to compression is classifying. I have developed three categories using my limited knowledge of physics and chemistry to classify the many masters that administrators are required to serve. The three categories are endothermic users, exothermic users and toxic users.

Endothermic users are those whose energy content output exceeds the energy content of the reactant. An admin can invest a small amount of energy into an endothermic user--showing them how to install a print driver--and the resulting output is greater than the energy expended. In this case, the user installs the driver on all the other systems in the department that need it.

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