syslog

As you probably know, every year Sys Admin mails a reader survey through which we hope to learn more about our readers and how we can better serve them through the magazine. Here are some highlights from this year's survey. Security, scripting languages, performance tuning, system monitoring, network management, and user account setup and maintenance are the topics of most interest to you. Amy Rich's Q&A is your favorite column (for the fourth consecutive year!) followed by Randal Schwartz's Perl Advisor.

According to the survey, readers are supporting more users than ever. 22% said they now support 100 or more users, and 36% support more than 500. The most widely administered Unix operating systems are (in order): Linux (mainly Red Hat), Solaris, MacOS X, AIX, HP-UX, and BSD. We also asked which languages readers program in, and the results indicated that 82% program in shell, 75% use Perl, 51% program in C/C++; 42% in PHP, and 30% program in Java.

The write-in answers are always my favorite part of the survey. In response to the question "What do you like most about Sys Admin?", readers said:

Great information on tried solutions and industry practices with implementation.
Code examples.
Having the TOC on the front cover.
It has articles describing solutions to the same problems I have.
Software articles from a maintenance standpoint; scripting articles.
Learning new tools/procedures and learning more about old ones.

We also asked "What do you like least about Sys Admin?", and responses included:

Lack of depth of some articles.
Nothing really jumps out at me at the moment.
Too much Solaris.
Not enough time in the day to read all the good stuff.

And here are some suggestions we received for making Sys Admin more useful:

Pick an open source application like Sendmail or Apache and dissect it over the course of several issues and give some examples of custom setups.
More in-depth articles.
More code!
More security articles.

I thank all of you who took the time to respond, and I invite those of you who did not receive a survey to email your likes, dislikes, and suggestions to me at: aankerholz@cmp.com.

Note that along with this month's magazine covering database topics, we've included a bonus spam issue. The spam issue features an article by Sys Admin's technical editor, Hal Pomeranz, describing how to incorporate a blacklist into your mail server configuration. Other articles describe how to identify and block compromised hosts and how to get the most out of Sendmail's milter. As always, I hope you find these issues useful.

Sincerely yours,

Amber Ankerholz
Editor in Chief