It has been a common practice for a lot of systems administrators to take systems in the Data Center for a spin; some are inspired by their buddy Chuck… you know Chuck, he is the outgoing guy from the local users’ group… and others by their own thirst for knowledge. They click around in the GUIs, look to see first hand what the command they heard about actually does, bang at the keyboard while exploring the CLI, and mull over what features they think they need to implement in their environment.

I see the hunger to expand their understanding of the systems as a very valuable trait – a trait I personally wish was more dominant in our world. I praise administrators who actually take the time to read the CLI guide, discover that they can create server farms full of 4-way SMP VMs in their new VMware Cluster, and see the possible benefits of implementing IVR in their Cisco SAN environment. Knowing the abilities of the systems is a wonderful thing and can make someone a more treasured resource; however, it must be said that actually implementing something because you could, and not because you should, can be the source of some major headaches for yourself and others.

I’d be the first to tell you that most of my headaches are brought on because someone did something because they could – the system had the ability to do it, they researched how it could be done, and they pulled the trigger. Some of these features worked well for the first six months until they needed to expand the environment, and now they needed to take an outage to address the issue or pay for workaround to their implementation of that nifty new feature.

“ ’cause I could ” is possibly the scariest response to many questions I ask about why and how something has been implemented. Please, do us all a favor the next time you, or your buddy Chuck, plan to pull the trigger on some feature you just learned about—slow down and ask yourself a few questions first…Did you research how this feature impacts the other projects and systems currently in the works? Is this actually needed, and will it really do what you think it will? Did you pick the brain of someone with more knowledge about that particular technology and ask about the gotchas? A few more questions may just save a trip to Rite Aid for another bottle of Excedrin Migraine.