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Nominate SysAdmin of the Year By Oct. 12

Posted by kdawson on from the barely-sung-heroes dept.

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."

5 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. bofh == win by User+956 · · Score: 5, Funny

    I nominate this guy

    --
    The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
  2. I nominate Eikonoklastes by eikonoklastes · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  3. USA and Canada only by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  4. Stupid contest by mcrbids · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
  5. A nominee from Eastern Europe by Erikderzweite · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.