administration

In most organisations the administration/support team, although they can be acknowledged as being important to the business, they are treated as if they're not.

One well-honed item in every sys admin's toolbox is a preferred scripting language -- maybe sh, or ksh, or Perl, or something more unusual, like Rexx or Ruby. I find Python so capable and easy to learn that in my consulting role at Phaseit, I tell newcomers it's the best single language they can learn. Python spans a wider range of applications than any other language I know -- even more than C or Java -- and beginners pick it up quickly.

Debian has a package manager (DPKG) that resolves dependency problems automatically. It help us to automatically keep up to date programs looking for new versions on the internet, resolving and completing the files and libraries dependencies which a package requires, making system administration easy and keeping us up to date with the new security changes. It also shows some important and substantial security features: it doesn't have commercial goals, also doesn't obey mercantile urgencies, It has a good pursuit of errors, problems are fixed in less than 48 hours and it's priority is to develop a complete and reliable operating system.