I present you with my small list of best practices that I have used in the past as reference material and guidelines for work I have done.  I hope that by sharing this it will inspire you to share your favorites, or even create your own best practices documents to help move the practice of system administration and programming forward.

Programming

• Some general common-sense best practices for scripting.  It has a UNIX slant but the concepts can easily be translated to any system.  Use comments, name variables well, etc.  Generally, pretend like your code will be on public display. – http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9180590/Scripting_best_practices
• The use of “skeleton projects” always gives me mixed feelings.  On the one hand I very much agree with not inventing the wheel over and over again.  If you have something that is solid and well documented than why change it.  In my opinion skeleton projects should be well documented and well understood, lest they quickly turn into “cargo code” – http://reinout.vanrees.org/weblog/2010/07/30/skeleton.html
• Not so much a list of best practices, but a list of what not to do.  The Anti Patterns Catalog is some enjoyable reading because, if your ego can stand it, you will recognize a lot of these.  By the way c2.com is the original wiki, yes seriously!

Web

• Yahoo! has created a great checklist for speeding up your website.  The think I enjoy about this guide is that they are practical examples along with why you want to do it. If you like this, please check out their automated tool YSlow.

DNS

• Monkey House has a nice Top 10 DNS best practices.  While, I’m not sure of this are truly the top ten most common slip ups or the top ten most important things to consider, it is a well-rounded look at some things you should consider when setting up or maintaining DNS
• Again, not so much a list of best practices, but Cisco offers a great overview/refresher to dns as well as a detailed list for detecting and preventing dns abuse of Cisco products
• ComputerWorld presents a decent, high-level overview of best practices for reliable dns and dhcp.  Referenced in the article is CERT’s  Securing an Internet Name Server.  Some of the techniques in this paper were specific to certain versions of BIND, but the theory can be applied elsewhere

Active Directory

• So to start off these are some pretty obvious and basic guidelines.  You should probably get your hands slapped if you aren’t already following these guidelines by Microsoft
• An excellent best practices guide from Microsoft, geared towards large scale deployments of Active Directory
• Some good tips on Group Policy and OU layout
• I don’t know if you can call two tips a best practice, but it is a good start to building up a solid foundation for your Group Policy

Infosec

• Ironically, Microsoft comes in with an excellent white-paper on Best Practices for Enterprise Security
• Nice list of security standards from Berkley – intended for students and staff, but could easily be adapted to your environment

Thanks for reading.  I look forward to hearing what your best practices are.  Are they hard-won lessons learned on the job?  Industry standards?  Personal preferences?

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