The SysAdmin is the person who is responsible for maintaining the computer systems at a particular site.
Although they have SuperUser[1] permissions, SysAdmins are mere mortals, and are subject to normal human mistakes. They often work under great pressures of time and responsibilities - handling problems with systems in the day under great pressure, or at night with little sleep.
In addition, a member of the Linux-HA mailing list gives this additional factoid concerning SysAdmins:
Every so often one of our SysAdmins goes out partying because he's so happy that heartbeat is working so well and might not be fully sober in the morning when he works on one of the change requests from a customer. The result is a wrong ruleset which could disable the heartbeat or another resource which again could lead into a fake failover.
BOFH[2], The Register[3]
| [1] | http://www.linux-ha.org/SuperUser |
| [2] | http://bofh.ntk.net/Bastard_Indexes.html |
| [3] | http://www.theregister.co.uk/odds/bofh/ |
This information provided courtesy of the Linux-HA project at http://linux-ha.org/