System Administrator Appreciation Day is an annual ICT Holiday created by Ted Kekatos in 2000. It takes place in the last Friday in July, hence today is the 16th SysAdmin Day. So as they put it: Remember this is one day to recognize your System Administrator for their workplace contributions and to promote professional excellence. Thank them for all the things they do for you and your business.
To keep track of ICT Holidays, you can use the International ICT Holidays calendar, a Google calendar maintained by the Computer Engineers Association of Spain (ATI).
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A shout out to everyone keeping the site running.
takyon: The last time you got 'preciated was in 2015.
- System Administrator Appreciation Day
- Sysadmin trained his offshore replacements, sat back, watched ex-employer's world burn
- UC Berkeley students' heroic efforts can't stop CalCentral from crashing
martyb: An obligatory xkcd Devotion to Duty.
For some light reading see: When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth by Cory Doctorow.
And please join me in thanking TheMightyBuzzard, mechanicjay, audioguy, Deucalion, Ncommander, and paulej72 who have kept this site (and all the attendant backend services) running! And, if some of those names do not look familiar, that gives you an idea of how good these guys are! Thanks to all you!
(Score: 3, Funny) by davester666 on Friday July 31 2015, @06:07AM
from putting all this crap on my computer.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Friday July 31 2015, @06:08AM
I've never heard of this "holiday". Which I figure is good news. My definition of a good sysadmin is someone you meet in the hallway, and have to wonder "who is that?", because a good sysadmin keeps things running so smoothly that you figure they must have nothing to do.
FWIW, on the side, I do the sysadmin work at a small company. When someone calls me, it's only ever bad news. I like not being called.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday July 31 2015, @06:22AM
The best sysadm one can have is the one that one really pay to do nothing.
It means that s/he automated everything that even the SMART (or whatever disk controller statistics) a processed and a purchase request for spares is automatically generated for approval.
But we can't have such a guy, the penny counters must maximize profit, not the value delivered to business customers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @07:53AM
No. If you are not keeping yourself up to date about technology, and about newly found vulnerabilities that might affect your systems, you're not a good sysadmin. No scripting can replace that. Those things must get into your brain, and that means you have to actively put them there.
Of course that might give the impression that you are doing nothing but surfing the web during your work time.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday July 31 2015, @09:57AM
Heh! Based on that, I might well be on my way to become the best sysadm. The rest may come later.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @03:25PM
Good luck keeping up with even a tenth of security advances and vulnerabilities. There is a reason why even moderately good security now requires a full-time position in even relatively small organizations.
Security breaches happen when there is an insufficient level of specialists on staff. Requiring a regular sysadmin to know end-to-end security is like requiring an embedded systems developer to know how to design and manage power substations for a city. It just is no longer possible for one person to do both.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday July 31 2015, @08:07PM
Based on the news, security breaches happen because people hook vital infrastructure up to the Internet, store passwords in plaintext or MD5 unsalted hashes, use weak passwords, neglect software updates for more than a year, fall to phishing attempts, fail to use parametrized MySQL queries, or some other variation of "babby's first sysadmin mistake".
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday July 31 2015, @05:52PM
I've never heard of this "holiday". Which I figure is good news. My definition of a good sysadmin is someone you meet in the hallway, and have to wonder "who is that?", because a good sysadmin keeps things running so smoothly that you figure they must have nothing to do.
Unfortunately, those who make the budget decisions too often make the latter assumption and then decide they are paying too much for someone who "has nothing to do".
(Score: 2) by mendax on Friday July 31 2015, @07:15AM
Do we give them flowers? Maybe a colorful Mandelbrot or Julia set fractal poster would be more appropriate. Something he or she can hang on the wall of his office or cube.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Friday July 31 2015, @07:36AM
Last time I've heard they don't drink flowers, nor Mandelbrot posters.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by martyb on Friday July 31 2015, @09:55AM
I fear I will forget someone — as this is written before sunrise and coffee, and from memory — but I'm still going to try:
To: NCommander, paulej72, TheMightyBuzzard, Juggs, MechanicJ, chromas, mrcoolbp, Landon, cosurgi, all the Editors, and to all others, past and present, who started/maintained SoylentNews:
We had frequent crashes in the early days; now, things mostly "Just Work®"... at least from a user's perspective. From what I've seen in IRC, there is a *LOT* more happening under the hood. That things are running so smoothly is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the (all volunteer!) staff.
So, please accept my deep and heartfelt thanks for all you do to keep this site up and running, as well as provide patches, make improvements, and make it possible for this community to grow and flourish!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday July 31 2015, @11:48AM
The guy who wrote Nudist on the Late Shift broadcast that message to his mailing list a year after he failed to clue in to that the mother of his child is a mother too.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Friday July 31 2015, @11:07AM
So they have this appreciation day at the end of July, when everyone is on vacation?
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday July 31 2015, @11:22AM
Dunno how others do it, but I take this "vacation time" as the ideal time to make changes to the infrastructure. For my little part-time gig, I rarely put in as many hours as during the two weeks that the company is official closed for summer vacation.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Friday July 31 2015, @12:22PM
Yes, but I meant no one else in the company is going to be around to give you attaboys on system admin day, or even know it is a real thing. You think they'd schedule it for after Labor Day or something so someone would actually be around that day to appreciate sys admins.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by No Respect on Friday July 31 2015, @11:31AM
Never heard of it. Is this a Hallmark Cards invention? 1-800-FL0WERS maybe?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday July 31 2015, @01:04PM
As a former employee of the other major greeting card company in the US, no, neither us nor Hallmark made that one up - the market isn't large enough to justify doing so. When you compare that to, say, Sweetest Day (which was more the candy industry than the greeting card industry), there just isn't as much money to be made.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday July 31 2015, @11:45AM
The Sochi Winter Olympics were budgeted to cost I think ten billion dollars; the fifty billion final tally is the result of construction workers who thought of Vladimir Putin much the same way as I thought of John Sculley when he was CEO of Apple, later CEO of Live Picture.
I met John once, real nice guy in person, sang my press to the press, threw fifty people right out of their jobs. One of my Live Picture coworkers was homeless for years, Damn near committed suicide. He's back in his feet now though. My divorce is largely the result of the Dot-Com Crash; John Scully's part in that was to shitcan our professional prepress imaging product because "The Street doesn't value tools" to focus on some manner of 3-D animated online consumer marketing survey product, because Internet.
Sochi's construction workers would install such things as upside-down toilet seats (the lid underneath the overturned seat). Some hotel rooms had no light bulbs but lots of lamps, other rooms had no lamps but lots of light bulbs. Missing doorknobs were a common problem, even if the press has a room to sleep in they can't enter it.
Just about the worst career mistake I ever made was not to accept Octel Communication's offer for a permanent position. Not because I would have become filthy rich, but because Octel was such a wonderful place for me, and for the lady I was with at the time. When I came home to her from Octel while I may have been tired I was always happy to see Jan. When I arrived back at work I was always happy to be there, but no, I sadly resigned six months later because I felt that was the best thing I could do for Santa Cruz and for Jan.
I was a SysAdmin at Octel in 1989, for two hundred engineers, three at first then a fourth SunOS - not Solaris - 3/280 servers, a few SCO XENIX 386 PCs and a whole bunch of MS-DOS PCs with SUN PC-NFS.
The thinnet coax kept falling out of its BNC connectors because Octel is The Telephone Company: to a PBX Operator, 50 Ohm Coax looks just like 70 Ohm video cable. That was when I learned all about bisection bug isolation.
There were many glass TTYs that did not work because PBX Operator:
"Can you point out my RS-232 cables?"
"This here is a punchdown block. You'll need this" - he hands me a simple tool - "to punch your wires into these". "These" were small pairs of metal prongs that stripped the insulation from the telephone wire then dug into its copper core.
"So which of these wires is the Send Data, the Receive Data and the Ground? Do any have Modem Control lines?"
"This here's your tip, and this here's your ring. You need two pairs: two tips and two rings. This tip is your Ground, this tip is your Send Data, this ring is your Receive Data."
Lizard-Man Ibarreta later explained that the PBX operator was referring to old-skoole telephone operator patch cords. I own a pair for my piano keyboard and its amps. Tip and Ring work great for audio. :-/
That same PBX Operator expressed dismay a few months later when he caught me red-handed mindlessly ripping handfuls of wire out of his Mother Fucking punchdown block. Actually it was quite a large panel full of such punchdown blocks.
My manager never checked her emails, I always had to call her on the phone. If it wasn't important I would leave her a voice mail otherwise I would wander all over G-d's Creation looking for her. One night my servers were an angry smoking puddle of molten Silicon so I phoned her immediately, only to get a raucously loud sqauwking noise from our PBX.
"Fuck this" I said to myself then emailed her about the raucously loud squawk. My hope was that she'd tell our PBX Operator to fix out damn PBX.
The following afternoon, Karen asked me to step into her office for a private chat:
"Mike, that was a build of our next release. I needed to know about its failure right away."
"So did you want me to leave you a voice mail?"
Karen was on top of all my eMails after that.
While I enjoyed my work, just once did an engineer take me to lunch for helping him write a shell script - he was asking me about "logical names". That's the VMS command procedure term for an open file; that would work in Python as well as many other modern scripting languages but back in the day we only had Bourne Shell and C Shell. We could have licensed Korn Shell but it was fiendishly expensive.
So I expect that shell scripts fork a new process, opens a file, reads or writes into it then closes the file before forking the next process. That's The UNIX[1 [soylentnews.org]] Way!
The entry-level engineer who took me to lunch was up to his eyeballs in a mortgage and a pack of chilluns. That meant the world to me; think of that the next time your manager buys you lunch on the company dime.
Just twice, two different engineers - most of them were embedded developers, as Octel invented voice mail, perhaps you've heard of voice mail - dropped by my office to thank me for all the hard work I performed. Each of them explained they did so because "No one ever talks to you unless our server is on fire".
I had not helped either of them in any way other than to keep our servers up.
As a consultant to Octel Communications I wasn't entitled to employee bonuses, but even so my manager Karen Coates slipped me a wad of cash when no one was looking.
My girl and I had quite a nice time at my company picnic. Octel's founder snapped a photo of me and Jan firing squirt guns directly at his camera, both of us wearing tye-die as we both lived in Santa Cruz, then gave us each a print.
That day and that evening after we got home was the very best time I ever had with Jan. She is a wonderful woman in so very many ways but in others she treated me very poorly. She treated herself poorly as well but there wasn't much I could do about it.
But the day of Octel's company picnic - just that one day - Jan and I were truly happy together. It brings tears to my eyes now to think of what he had but for one single day.
That's why we have company picnics: to make people happy, not to increase employee retention.
Karen was after me like a Pit Bull On A Pork Roast to accept her permanent offer, even paid for some very expensive training, took me with her whenever she visited other companies under the pretense I had the first clue what those other companies were talking talking about, paid for a very expensive security tutorial at Interop '89, gave me lots of time off even when I didn't request it.
But in part because I wanted to be a Mac programmer, and in part because Jan and I lived in Santa Cruz when the October '89 Loma Prieta Earthquake totaly destroyed our home town, I reluctantly resigned so I could help rebuild our City.
Karen was completely sympathetic and so still gives me enthusiastic employment references.
Imagine my dismay when I moved on to Apple to do MacTCP 1.0.1's SQA when the dust settled in Santa Cruz:
This because Apple regards its company picnic as an employee benefit. Were My Security Guard or I permitted to attend, we would have standing to sue in civil court, also we could rat out Apple to the IRS and California Franchise Tax Board.
That actually happened a few years later when thousands of Microsoft contracts grew weary of Bill's Heavy Boot Heels so they stuck it to The Man. Despite that they prevailed in court, Microsoft continues to violate all manner of labor and tax laws.
Today I have My Barmaid, she works at NSFW Mary's Club [marysclub.com]. I will visit her in the morning, she always hugs me and is always very happy to see me.
And Yes: while I don't read Playboy for its insightful writing, I really do hang out at a strip club so I can gaze upon the beauty of its bartender. But again I am not that kind of homewrecker. Even if I were her children are all grown.
No, I shall visit Lady Dulcinea this morning, My Barmaid Saturday morning so I can seek My Barmaid's advice on how to win Dulcinea's heart.
In reality, Dulcinea del Toboso [warplife.com] is a Princess!
Thank you Soylent News. I've always said I could never have supper without eating all of your recycled dead bodies.
(Score: 1) by linkdude64 on Friday July 31 2015, @01:52PM
Thank you for sharing, I read every word.
That is all.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday July 31 2015, @11:56PM
My kuro5hin friends are long weary of my Walls Of Text. They tell me no one reads my essays anymore. I point out my server logs, but they redouble their derision.
I write in part to benefit others but mostly so I can tell my story before my tick expires.
My father wanted to tell me about Vietnam but Mom would not permit him to speak of it. When the end came while I was by his side but he could no longer speak.
I asked but one last question. Dad's final word was to close then open both his eyes.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2015, @12:03AM
With all the drivel MDC spews forth, if I ever saw his re'sume' I would think ... whether or not this guy is as good as he believes he is, he is nothing better than a law suit waiting to happen. NO THANKS!" Please just shut up.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday August 01 2015, @12:08AM
Because he didnt pay me for distributing his advertising flyers when I was in high school.
http://www.warplife.com/mdc/resume/ [warplife.com]
http://www.warplife.com/custom-software-development/ [warplife.com]
http://www.warplife.com/mac-driver-development/ [warplife.com]
I have never filed any other complaints, because I support the assertion that the best response to hate speech is more speech.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2015, @12:07AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2015, @02:58PM