My philosophy of system administration boils down to a few basic strategies that can be applied to virtually any of its component tasks:
Know how things work. In these days, when operating systems are marketed as requiring little or no system administration, and the omnipresent simple-to-use tools attempt to make system administration simple for an uninformed novice, someone has to understand the nuances and details of how things really work. It should be you.
Read the doc before starting, because you will end up by readding the documentation and you will save time.
Plan it before you do it.
Make it reversible (backups help a lot with this one).
Make a copy of your config file before editing (Write a small script to do it will be useful
script)
Use
CVS to store config files and keep an history and add a note and date when you do a change.
Make changes incrementally (Make changes step by step give you a better to undo it).
Simplify, complexity is a bane when it comes to maintenance.
Test, test, test, before you unleash it on the world.
