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Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day
ArbiterOne writes "The 11th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day is today. Celebrated worldwide on the last Friday of July, this day honors those who fight in the digital trenches to keep the Net alive. OpenDNS offers a way to remind your boss about the holiday, while another blogger shares war stories. The startup Ksplice has created an homage to these heroes in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure." Reader Netbuzz submits a sobering look at the profession from Network World, which notes, "In the past year, [sysadmins'] pay has dropped, and more of their positions are being farmed out to temporary workers."
Ask your boss to stay with you till you leave work.
In soviet Russia, God creates you!
I've been a sysadmin for a while time now, and I've never had one person wish me a happy admin day. It would seem the only people who know about this, happen to be sysadmins. No one has a clue when I mention it. We need more sysadmin day advertising. Someone want to fund a commercial? Lets add it to every calendar world wide. Who's with me?
This is not the penguin you're looking for.
Mailing list posting from one of the sysadmins (Too bad they don't do word wraps).
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/78attendees/current/msg00848.html
Staying up until 7 AM so that bunch of geeks could get decent connectivity in their hotel - kudos.
There was also the nice orange Cat6 cable running through the parking lot, going through windowframes and doorways and ending up at a Catalyst switch taped to a window :)
When we leave the bag of dog poop in their cube, we don't light it?
I think I can handle that.
I need trepanation like I need a hole in the head.
A System Administrator is different than the Network Administrator. They may be the same individual, but the job is different.
It is the *Network* Administrators that keep the Net alive. Without them, the System Administrator's servers would be just islands.
Hey ! happy sysadmin day to everyone !!
Here in Argentina we are having an after-office to toast to ourselves and our servers !!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVA6zCQwE-c :wq!
http://www.diadeladmin.com.ar
The 11th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day is today. Celebrated worldwide on the last Friday of July,
Celebrated by who? I've never heard of it and now that I have, I wish I hadn't.
... I'd like to wish our BOFH overlords a happy sysadmin day.
Have gnu, will travel.
just as soon as i put this sql group back into rotation and i need to doublecheck the logs on the new smtp relays to make sure they arent doing that weird bounce thing they were last night...er...morning right? it was 2ish?
BTW whats the cake for today.
Good people go to bed earlier.
...and you know it, clap your hands!
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
It's 1707 in the UK and I am just about to leave for home. NOW YOU TELL ME - so no cakes and flowers for me then.
AT&ROFLMAO
I'm the sysadmin, among other things.
If something figuratively burns down and I have to fix it in odd hours, I get thanked for it, and I'm able to take paid time off.
That's okay I guess.
And as with all the other named days of recognition, I will disregard it.
It seems nice to have a day for it... people don't care or even notice that System Admins exist until something goes wrong, and then they are simply blamed until it goes right again.
There are two types of people in the world; those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don't.
I opened a trouble ticket with the text "Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day!"
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
That's like having a day for sasquatch. A Happy System Administrator? Doesn't exist!
Clearly you don't work for a company with 500+ desktop users and countless outside users hitting various web servers every day where IT is at the core of the business (like say, a large e-commerce outfit or a telco). But even in those places IT is seen by many as nothing more than unimportant computer janitors, yet when for one reason or another no one in IT is around for a few days the entire operation comes to a screeching halt and some poor sysadmin with a high fever and a headache capable of killing large farm animals has to stumble to work to fix something that someone broke, the classic examples including someone deciding that it would be ok to cut power to the main on-site server room "for just a minute" (read: 30+ minutes so most servers shut down) so they can repair the elevator (because it's easier to just switch the power for the entire building off than taking 30 seconds to figure out which switch to turn off. And yes, this meant that everyone in our main building sat around doing nothing for the 30-60 minutes it took to repair the elevator and then another couple of hours while IT rushed to repair the damage), someone in senior management deciding to power-cycle the domain controller when they can't login at 8 AM (since they denied the required server upgrade so the domain controllers can't handle the load efter merging with another company which is now using the same domain controllers) and countless others...
And in case you're wondering how they managed to find the domain controller? Well, this senior manglement character actually called a person in IT (who was actually on vacation that week) saying he couldn't login, he was told this was most likely due to too many users trying to login at once, he then asked a few followup questions including the name of the domain controller. The person being asked these questions assumed this was just curiosity/research into the possibility of pushing for money for new domain controller machines, turns out this person had somehow figured out that if he power-cycled the primary DC he'd disconnect everyone who was logging in so he'd be able to login faster and since all our servers are labeled and senior manglement has access to every part of the building....)
My wife told me this holiday was a bunch of garabge. So I told her no more flowers on Administrative Professionals' Day. And then I DDoS'd her server. Haha!
"In the past year, [sysadmins'] pay has dropped, and more of their positions are being farmed out to temporary workers."
Sysadmins... and everyone else.
That said, cheers to all the sysadmins out there and thanks for all the hard work!
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Somebody must have been reading the intranet site at my company because this year people brought in food for the I.T. department. It's on the company event calendar. I'm stuffed. The food and appreciation makes me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
thanks for making the tubes work, keep it up!
LEARN to use the equipment necessary to DO YOUR JOB just like a mechanic learns to use the tools he needs and THEN maybe you can spout off about us supporting you. Most IT support roles could be eliminated if the end users weren't either blithering idiots or pathologically scared of computers. Seriously, if you can't remember your password how do you manage to drive a car to work and back every day?
is a SAAD day for all of us.
well if we did have to change it each week then it will not be that hard.
Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day... Humpf!
That's easy... when will we have our own Appreciaton Day, us grumpy admins?
Bollocks!
"...and some poor sysadmin with a high fever and a headache capable of killing large farm animals has to stumble to work to fix something that someone broke,..."
Amen to that - I fell seriously ill on the last day of a holiday about 2hr drive from home. I also have T2 diabetes, which just added to the fun. I emailed my boss in the afternoon of that last day to say I would be staying over until I was fit for travel. My boss responded the next morning to enquire whether I was coming in to work and I replied when I managed to wake up and crawl out of bed at around 11am that I was staying another day then someone was driving me home via my doctor (who subsequently signed me off work for 2 weeks with strong antibiotics for a serious chest infection).
Anyway, when I got home there was a hand delivered letter from work inviting me to a disciplinary hearing upon my return for failing to notify my boss of my absence from work prior to the start of the working day (for the day I replied to his email at about 11).
Well, they went ahead with a formal disciplinary and put a first written warning on file, although that was only after I appealed against their initial decision to jump straight to a final written warning.
Fortunately that boss has gone now.
AT&ROFLMAO
We could have a company with no IT department. Oh it wouldn't run nearly as well, because you are an important SUPPORT function. But it would still bumble along somehow.
Maybe at a small business, but just try running a 50+ sized business without any IT. Your company would probably run swimmingly for the first year, have virus problems the next, catastrophic hardware failures and data loss the third, and then you'd sell the old computers without wiping the harddrives, and your business would then face legal troubles. IT may be a support role, but it's a mid-high educated support role, like a paralegal or a nurse (and a lot of us have a Masters in CS, but just don't like programming). Stop treating us like ditchdiggers. BTW, did you find that token yet? We can't get you back on the network with out it.
They like temps as they don need health care to be pay for by the work place and that why worker cost so much in the usa the high cost of health care that over seas that work places do not pay for.
Most IT support roles could be eliminated if the end users weren't either blithering idiots or pathologically scared of computer
No! No! Please continue in your ignorance!
http://xkcd.com/705/
It's nice to have a day you are appreciated. Next time you send that e-mail, save that document or IM your friend please remember all the hard work that goes into those services.
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
My car doesn't require me to create a new key every 30 days.
Dear Anonymous Coward
You are about to be subjected to a rant.
System Administrators generally don't work for the IT department, at least not in the way you seem to think. The IT department is where you find the Windows support people, while the System Administrator is the one who fixes things when the IT department has messed up, and implements safeguards to make it harder for IT to mess up, and easier to clean up when they succeed in doing it anyhow.
To use a language you might understand, a System Administrator is to IT PC support like an accountant is to a payroll clerk.
And yes, it's very conceivable that a small company can do without a sysadmin on the payroll. Just like they can do without an accountant on the payroll. The services can be purchased outside the company when needed.
But when the brown stuff hits the revolving blades, you may be glad you have them.
System Administrator Appreciation Day is about letting them know you appreciate all the times they have kept the faeces away from the chopping action, without you even noticing.
The better the sysadmin is, the lazier and more overpaid you think he is, because his success can be measured in all the bad things that doesn't happen. When your network didn't go down while your suit buddy's network did, you get upset with the sysadmin because e-mails to your buddy bounce while your buddy's network is down. You don't appreciate him for your network being up, despite all the things you and your suit friends have done to bring it down, including (but not limited to) surfing teen pr0n from your overpriced notebook while at a hotel room, bringing infected USB keys from home, "bringing" a printer home because you thought nobody used it (in reality, it would print out ALERTS, which thankfully weren't that often), or buying inadequate and overpriced hardware to scratch the back of your suit buddies at the nineteenth hole, blatantly ignorant of the problems interfacing yellow crap to brown crap. No, you leave that problem to the IT department, who can't tell crap from their own shoes (with good reason). So when the sysadmin fixes things to at least working conditions, you get upset because he isn't productive, and doesn't give you a big smile.
Dear Anonymous Coward, if you took the time to look things over, you might be astonished to find that the company does better when you are on vacation than it does when the sysadmin is. Perhaps you aren't as indispensable as you think?
You mean you don't have a copy of the email informing him that you would be out in your sent mail? And how do you arbitrarily skip a written warning?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
And most cars only have a key for both the door and ignition, and sometimes a locking gas cap. They don't have separate keys for the glove compartment, seat adjustment, gear shift, radio, wipers, and lights.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
My car doesn't require me to create a new key every 30 days.
Because a thief just needs to break the window. A car key is kind of like a password on a non-physically locked down computer, or one where the passwordless guest account has admin access.
But the purpose of a car is a lot simpler than that of a computer (when looking at the entire computer system).
A better way to look at it is to see the computer as a collection of tools (spreadsheet software being one tool, email client another and so on). But it still boggles the mind that some people can use the same software day after day, week after week, month after month and still have weekly calls to helpdesk because they forgot where the Print button is in the application they use for several hours per day (and which they print things from at least a couple of times per week)...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Happy [insert job your paid for doing here] day.
Mamby pamby whiny crap.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"..a high fever and a headache capable of killing large farm animals has to stumble to work to fix something that someone broke, "
Yeah, they shouldn't be coming to work. If they are that sick, and everything comes to a halt, then maybe management will get addition staffing.
as long as you allow yourself to be abused in that manner, you will be.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You're welcome.
Dear Sysadmin,
We could have a company with no IT department. Oh it wouldn't run nearly as well, because you are an important SUPPORT function. But it would still bumble along somehow. But it doesn't work the other way around. You can't fire everyone else and leave just the IT department, because then there'd be no one for you to support and no reason for you to exist.
So start acting like you understand that you're here to support me, and I'll start appreciating you more.
The happy sysadmin day will be the one one of us will rip with his bare hands the heart out the chest of one of you.
Sincerely, have yourself a bowl of dicks.
First of all, it's not to "support you". It's to support the company, with the tools it needs to do bussiness. No, that shinny laptop that your company assigned to you is not "yours". It's the company's. I know it's a tough concept, but it's lot's of people seem to forget about it.
Second, for more and more companies, IT isn't just a SUPPORT function. It's part of the core. IT downtime due to people that don't understand that they are using company property and not using their "cute toys" from home can cause serious financial problems. Yes, the company could "bumble along somehow". Its just that it might go bankrupt with the losses. Try to stop all the IT from a logistics company and say that "it's just support, the core is the trucks that move stuff!" and see what happens.
Third, I've seen companies composed entirely of IT people. Small, medium companies. And they survive. In fact, they thrive. You know why? Because IT people usually are curious about other things, and pretty intelligent, and able to take a leap of faith and try something else, if it comes to it. We are used to be able to adapt quickly. We are used to fend for ourselves, many times without a single drop of training/appreciation. But you know what? Anyone that wants to start a business, at some point says something like "hey, who's gonna take care of the computer stuff?". Yeah. You're gonna need an IT guy somewhere along the line. Oh, you can do it yourself, of course. Just wait until you loose 5 years of archived email to and from clients (that you must *legally* have), because your email server ran out of hard disk space, because the backups keep failing and you don't know why and never cared, because, hey, IT is just support, and anyone can do this right?
Fourth. IT is probably the number one department that knows its just supporting the "core" business. Sometimes the problem is the people in the other departments that have no clue what their place in the company is. It's easy to tell an IT department "get me a softwarez that manages relations with customers", but if the department that needs it doesn't have a clue about processes, about customer care, about what do actually do when a customer rings, it's kind of hard to make things work.
Fifth, please try not to be so arrogant about other people's jobs. You never know when your own job will be turned obsolete, and you might have to swallow your own words. And you can keep your "appreciation". As long as our direct managers know we are doing a good job, and shielding us from pointless, personal, idiotic attacks like your kind, we don't need any more "appreciation".
IT people are not be perfect. IT might be "complicated", and "make your head hurt". But please don't bash people needlessly. Everything you said could be said about top management and CEOs and director's boards. But I bet that you wouldn't have the guts to tell it to their faces.
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
Yay you. Here's a $%^&ing cookie. Now get the $%^@ back to work and hit your $%&^ing ticket quota!
And are you hiring?
Car manufacturers? Cars just get people to and from work. They're just support. Doctors? They just support people's health. Farmers? Carpenters? Teachers? Engineers? All just support for other people, so they can do their real work.
What most human beings do is support other human beings. The few who don't are parasites. Human societies are interdependent ecosystems.
Just like secretary-day, I find this a BS-day.. Why would a sysadmin have a special day? what is so special about him/her that they need a special day? You're getting paid to do the job you were hired for, just like any other person is being paid for the job he/she does and they don't get a special day.. it's just big BS...
Unfortunately my upstream would not appreciate me calling attention to SAAD in such a manner so unless I want a trouble ticket opened on me, I will have to keep it to myself.
And dont forget that the official UK sys admin day site is at http://www.sysadminday.co.uk/
I am confident that it wont get slashdotted.
Mainly because nobody cares about sys admins
Although I must admit that lots in work liked that I took in cakes!
Because you always need a smart fox!
No self-respecting sysadmin would dare sign their boss up for (er) spam, would they?
Dang. Your IT friend deserves at least a sucker. Wait - no those can be messy when he/she is working on those computer things. A gummy bear would be more fitting. Those have no spine either.
Ps. For the humor impaired, this was/is sarcasm. On multiple levels. Reading comprehension is FUN!
With such comments as "Most days you suck. Today you suck less." and "Great job at keeping things working most of the time" *sniffle, tries to hold back tears*
(only reason they remember is I have it added to my shared work calendar)
What about Desktop Administrator Appreciation Day, for those who keep your actual machine running?
And not just corporate environments either, although that in itself is as big a job as System Administrators (try and wrangle an Office or Firefox upgrade to 5000 users some day). But also that guy that you call with that stupid question about that thing with that error. Just because he "knows computers". Your personal helpdesk whose time you intrude on?
Yeah. We need a day. And a lie-down.
a System Administrator is to IT PC support like an accountant is to a payroll clerk.
Wow. If I was someone who administered 5000 desktop workstations, I might be insulted.
Oh wait, I am.
Being put at the IT kiddie table just because I don't administer servers, and instead am responsible for the simultaneous administration, patching, deployment, configuration management and operation of 5000 machines across several disparate locations? Yeah, that's not the slightest bit arrogant. You may not like to directly touch the desktop, but it's the job of people like me to make sure everyone's using a patched version of Firefox, everyone's got the hotfix for the latest Microsoft disaster, and while the almighty servers might still be running, all the workstations (all 5000 of them) don't fall in a heap.
Desktop Administration is every bit as stressful as System Administration. More so, I would argue. It takes balls to flip a switch that is going to pump software out to 5000 machines all at once, all of them uniquely different.