Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day 108
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."
Happy sysadmin day? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Dear Sysadmin (Score:5, Interesting)
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....)
Re:Happy sysadmin day? (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone want to fund a commercial? Lets add it to every calendar world wide. Who's with me?
We don't need commercials, how lame is that!
Like the calendar idea.
How about using adzapper (or the like) on our proxies replacing all ads with a "happy sysadmin's day" message for the day?
Re:Dear Sysadmin (Score:4, Interesting)
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.