The LazySystemAdministrator is the best sort of SystemAdministrator. I know this isn't intuitive, but it's quite simple once explained.

Lazy people don't like doing work. They try to either get out of doing the work, which tends to get them fired, or they find ways of doing the job quicker and with less effort. This isn't rewarded in a lot of jobs, but it makes the job of a SystemAdministrator a lot easier. The less time a SystemAdministrator spends doing repetitive, mundane tasks, the more time he gets to spend on real work. The LazySystemAdministrator is truly the best sort.

For, example, if the user creation mechanism for your network involves adding a user account on the NIS server, adding a Samba password, adding the name and details of the user into a contact database, and manually making sure the user is in all the groups she is supposed to be in, it takes a fair while. Add to that the creation of the home dir, copying templates across and so on, as well as anything special to that user. Suddenly it takes forever to add a user! What if you have to add two of them? Or twenty?

The LazySystemAdministrator can't be bothered doing this repetitive work. He'd much rather get back to the interesting stuff, like reading kuro5hin or randomly killing peoples processes. He spends a bit of time setting up a completely centralised user database - using LDAP instead of NIS - which everything he wants to support will use. He upgrades samba to use LDAP natively, he sets appropriate objectClasses in the LDAP tree so contact information etc can be stored with the user, and he writes a bunch of scripts that ask a few questions, such as user name, user class, and password, which then go and create the users home dir and populate it with appropriate templates, adds the user to the LDAP tree and fills in the right details - including both unix and samba passwords - and sets the correct groups based on the class of user. OK, he spends a day or seven getting this to work, but thats ok, because everyone knows Lazy people would rather do anything else than the work they are supposed to be doing (in this case, manually adding users).

When its all working, he just runs his script a few times and its all working fine.

Another example of the LazySystemAdministrator is one that I'm trying get my particular LazySystemAdministrator to implement. He's not Lazy enough it seems :). We have the occasional need (more often than once a month, but definitely not on a daily basis) of installing Debian on a brand-new machine. Most machines we get these days have PXE capable network cards, or else are supported by a PXE-on-disk boot image. We could have a Debian autoinstall candidate being served to any computers that request a DHCP lease when plugged into a particular network port. The autoinstall could either prompt for some basic information, such as network config and partition requirements, or it do a standard install and let the owner of the new box do the rest later on. You plug the machine into this network cable, boot it up via native PXE or from a bootdisk, and its installed. 10 minutes later you can sit down at the machine and configure it. Or, as we do now, you can spend 10 minutes finding a working cdrom drive, then 15 minutes looking for a working debian woody cd, then another 10 minutes burning one when you cant find the real copy, and then finally get round to installing it off cdrom, including having to manually add the initial package lists (ssh isn't installed yet). You get the point.