Happy Systems Administrator Day

It’s often a thankless job and I can tell you that honestly since I am an Systems Administrator myself. I often tell people that “If all goes well people never know I was even here.” This is very true. The thing is that most complex systems have a way of breaking down. Call it job security, or call it poor planning, or blame the shitty architecture decisions but the reality is that most computer systems will always require gentle care and feeding. Enter the world of the Systems Administrator.

A sysadmin is a professional, who plans, worries, hacks, fixes, pushes, advocates, protects and creates good computer networks, to get you your data, to help you do work — to bring the potential of computing ever closer to reality. – [sysadminday.com]

I don’t know about professional. I’m wearing shorts at the moment and I personally have access to two Nerf Ball toys, an Airzooka Blaster, a Mame Arcade machine and one of our favorite past times is a game we call “Entrapment” where you ask someone a question in their cubicle and see how it takes them to figure out you also farted.

nobody wants a "garbage file"

We do plan, hack, fix, push, protect and create though. I’m not sure I’d use the words “worry” or “advocate”. Most days we spend a lot of time bitching. The elderly Indian-American genius that I work with actually and literally “washes his hands” of inane ideas that are often forced upon us by Management™. He is also known to shout “Fuck this shit!” It’s quite a treat. He’s a 21st Level Java Mage-Cleric though, so we all just smile and nod, backing away slowly. Luckily there are no tools or sharp objects on our row. Most of my teams work is done in a terminal window.

So what do I actually do all day sitting behind all three of those lovely monitors in the picture above? Other than comment on the open threads? I set up environments for code to execute in. I take the stuff that developers spend all day and night writing and I make it go. This is often more work than it sounds like.

I generally have to stop and learn something entirely new about once every three weeks. Much of what I do isn’t available in books. If they printed this information it would quickly be out of date and useless. I spend hours researching user forums online and opening trouble tickets with code vendors and then pressing those vendors to actually support the stuff my company paid them for. I suppose this could be called advocating.

We're not Gods. We're the remains of a probe that collided with God.

I don’t consider myself a genius. I’ll leave that title to iPaul at the mall. I’m just a quick learner with really fast hands. I’m like a Ninja but I’m not crouching and I only hide when I see certain Project Managers and then only if I’m already swamped that day. Sometimes I get to be the Hero, but I don’t look forward to that. If I’m the Hero it means that something went wrong. If I do things right people won’t be sure I did anything at all.

Please give a special thanks to Bens today; he handles all of this stuff for us here at Crasstalk. This site would not be possible without his work.

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