Nominate SysAdmin of the Year By Oct. 12

PMcGovern writes "Deadline for nominations for SysAdmin of the Year 2007 is this Friday Oct. 12. The award is sponsored by Slashdot, SourceForge, Digg, Usenix, Lopsa, Splunk, and Naspa. The first 2500 sysadmins nominated win a free SysAdmin Rockstar tee shirt. Prizes include a MacBook Pro, a non-bricked Apple iPhone, Gibson guitar, Splunk license, a full-paid trip to the LISA conference, cases of Red Bull, and more. If you know a sysadmin that goes beyond the call of duty, nominate them."

Comments

bofh == win

[User 956]

I nominate this guy

I nominate Eikonoklastes

[eikonoklastes]

Seeing as sysadmins are the ones reading slashdot, I foresee a tonne of self nominations.

USA and Canada only

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't this be called "north-american SysAdmin of the year", considering they only accept nominees from two countries...?

An unbricked iPhone?

[McNally]

Surely the sysadmin of the year should be able to unbrick their own iPhone..

Stupid contest

[mcrbids]

Really, the best sysadmin is one so good that he/she/it doesn't appear to do much of anything at all - because that's exactly what he/she/it should be doing. Who is really going to nominate a guy who seems to just sit around while everything around him seems to work just perfectly?

Thus, the contest is biased. You'll either get:

A) The guy that always seems "industrious", nominated by people who aren't sysadmins, or

B) The guy that seems "lazy", sits around not doing much at all while dozens to hundreds of carefully written scripts fire off all day long, sending an occasional message when an error condition is detected. Since this guy would have to be nominated by a sysadmin, and sysadmins are in the minority, this contest is biased in favor of the incompetent.

Re:Nobody here deserves it

[laejoh]

hehehe, later they'll say:

Only six people on Slashdot knew that the title of the Sysadmin of the Year was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it.

With humble apologies to a certain D. Adams of course

A nominee from Eastern Europe

[Erikderzweite]

A couple of years ago a friend of mine asked me for an advice. He has just started to work as a sysadmin at some middle-sized bank. They have had a lot of *NIX servers that were working just fine. But there was also one Windows NT-based server there with a *very* special application which was absolutely crucial for bank's business processes. The very special "feature" of this application was that it crashed quite often and took the whole server to the realm of BSODs with every crash. The old sysadmin was working in the server room and has had no problem resetting the server manually if needed. My friend, however, preferred remote administration from his sunny office (yea, i know, how weird it sounds :) ) so walking down to server room in order to restart a server was hardly an option for him.
Fixing a program was not possible - no source code was available.

After a weirdest brainstorming i have ever participated at, he finally found a solution - he has built together a crappy PC with linux 2.4 on board and connected it to the server via a crossover cable.
The sole task of this PC was to ping the alleged server and if it wasn't responding - eject /dev/hdc.
The cd-rom drive opened itself and pressed the Reset button on the server. Fool-proofed system and the funniest linux-based solution to solve windows proglems I've seen in my life.

But...

[jellomizer]

Isn't he best sysadmin the one you don't know is there. I find in general Bad Sysadmins are the ones complaining all the time, and always working very hard with fires, Complain about the pager because they know it will go off. While good sysadmins are rarely seen unless they want to be so. Because they have the organization running so well and smooth that most problems are preemptively fixed, the ones that are not have enough backup and fail over that he can fix without disrupting anyone else's work. That is a good sysadmin... The problem with that is they are also the first ones to be considered for layoffs because they don't seem to be working hard... But they learn in a couple of months that his job was necessary.