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Sysadmin of the Year

Posted by Hemos on Mon Oct 30, 2006 10:20 AM
from the and-the-millenium! dept.
Operating Systems Software Unix IT
PMcGovern writes "Do you know a great sysadmin? Nominate them for OSTG's sponsored Sysadmin of the Year. The first 2500 sysadmins nominated receive a free ThinkGeek T-shirt. Your sysadmin can also win great prizes including an Apple MacBook, a trip to the LISA conference in Washington DC, Splunk Professional server, and cases of Bawls soda. Only two weeks left to nominate your sysadmin (Oct. 31, 2006). (Note: Slashdot is part of OSTG.)"
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[+] News: "Sysadmin of the Year" Winners Announced 206 comments
lisah writes "Ten winners of this year's 'Sysadmin of the Year' contest have been announced and, while Robin 'Roblimo' Miller says it's not quite like winning the Miss America contest, being selected from approximately 2,500 entrants is nothing to sneeze at. This year's first place winner battled an office fire to save a RAID backup server, while another IT manager won an honorable mention for his dedicated work at a yarn store. From the article, '[The nominating entry said:] Any man who would take on a position at a yarn store, much less a technological position while surrounded by a dozen women, ages 55+ deserves some kind of reward...'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
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  • Ohhh that reminds me (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have to fire the Sysadmin today

  • Sadly (Score:5, Funny)

    by Aqua_boy17 (962670) on Monday October 30 2006, @10:26AM (#16642211)
    The only chance I have at winning this is if they're using Diebold machines to count the votes.

  • Prediction (Score:3, Funny)

    by Rob T Firefly (844560) on Monday October 30 2006, @10:28AM (#16642245) Homepage Journal
    5,268 votes cast by Slashdotters, resulting in 5,268 candidates all tying for first place.
  • This may be a first post. maybee not. But the real reason for this post is that there are no comments and the site is already slashdotted. either that or they realized that its not April 1st. After all any sys admin that gets nominated by someone other than a sys admin can't possibly be doing his job right.
    • And it's kind of already October 31 for some of the globe. I don't know what kind of timezone the slashdot editors are in, but that's a far cry from two weeks away.

  • My Nomination (Score:5, Funny)

    by canfirman (697952) <pdavi25@nOSPAm.yahoo.ca> on Monday October 30 2006, @10:29AM (#16642253)
    I nominate this guy. [wikipedia.org]

  • Late? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Adam9 (93947) on Monday October 30 2006, @10:30AM (#16642255) Journal
    Only two weeks left to nominate your sysadmin (Oct 31, 2006)

    Either Slashdot is late as usual they thought we rolled back 2 weeks instead of an hour last night.

  • Must be that "new" Math (Score:4, Insightful)

    by VGPowerlord (621254) on Monday October 30 2006, @10:31AM (#16642297) Homepage
    Only two weeks left to nominate your sysadmin (Oct 31, 2006). (Note: Slashdot is part of OSTG.)

    See, this is why you don't let submissions sit in the queue. Tomorrow is October 31st. One day is significantly shorter than two weeks.

  • Invisible workers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hoi Polloi (522990) on Monday October 30 2006, @10:32AM (#16642299) Journal
    Lets be honest, people only notice the sysadmins and network admins when things don't work, then they get flack. When they are busting their humps keeping things working or improving their systems they are generally taken for granted.

    • Re:Invisible workers (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 0racle (667029) on Monday October 30 2006, @10:49AM (#16642515)
      If you do the job right, no ones sure you've done anything at all.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by dpilot (134227)
        Then you get redeployed or given the opportunity to participate in a resource action.

        If only for your own management chain, it's probably good to generate some noise about the problems you've made sure nobody sees.
      • If you do the job right, no ones sure you've done anything at all.

        Yup. A sysadmin is one of the strangest jobs ever. There is no real schooling for it, most people are not that good at it, its fairly stressful with little external gratitude... The list goes on.

        Now, regarding this sysadmin of the year thing. Another strange thing about this sysadmin business is that I know of approximately 0 "famous" or even known ones besides the BOFH. That too goes into the stuff I said in the first paragraph.

        Other sim

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by WuphonsReach (684551)
          Whenever I try to explain, that I do zip during working hours, means I am doing a great job, people give me this sheepish look... If things dont work, its my fault...if things work, I'm a lazy bastard. Just forget about ordinary users voting for their sysadmin

          Yeah, no kidding. My usual tactic is to make sure that there are spare parts everywhere, lots of blinking lights, a few dozen windows display "tail -f" on the mail queue log, and stacks of books artfully arranged with dozens of bookmarks and/or ope
    • If you're doing a good job, nobody knows you exist.

      We have an employee recognition program where I work, but it's very rare for Sys Admins, developers and the like to ever get even a nomination. The people who usually get the awards are either instructors or the field service techs (who usually call one of us when they get stuck) who have their faces out there in the public eye. The people getting the votes are the people who showed them how to play a CD on their PC, not the guys behind the scenes protec
    • http://www.sysadminoftheyear.com/ [sysadminoftheyear.com]

      is down, slashdotted. Sack the sysadmin, I say!!!
    • people only notice the sysadmins and network admins when things don't work
      Bollocks. I've worked in different jobs and I can absolutely tell the difference between a pro-active and a reactive sysadmin. No downtimes (or starting at 16:00) , friendly answers to questions, can-do mentality, et cetera. People _do_ notice.
      • Thank you.

        So many sysadmins I see make their own job a misery by alienating users and doing an all round shitty job. I knew one who, rather than running using a routing protocol or getting it right in the first place, distributed scripts to change a users default gateway depending on what service they wanted to use. Countless times they forgot to change it back, and he'd belittle them. One day he left, and I replaced him.

        My first memo: "Throw those scripts away guys. You can now leave your default gat

  • My eyes! we don't all look like that, do we? I need another donut.
    • I asked for votes in exchange for fixing problems :P (before seeing that it's US and Canada only ) and everybody said "it looks just like you!!!"... (after pause)... "well, a few kilos heavier"

      Time to start excercising, I guess...
    • Next up, naked sysadmin calendar for 2007, with strategically placed tape cartridges, etc.
  • I know the greatest /. editor of all time is Hemos, bar none.

    Consistently professional, wise, witty, handsome, master lover and never posts dupes.

    (Is that good enough for a MacBook?)

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by eln (21727) *
      That might be good enough, except by the time he notices your post, the contest will have been over for two weeks, so you'll miss out anyway. Better luck next time.
  • Um I just nominated myself because I wanted a shirt, but I was probably too late...
    • Looks like the contest is designed to churn Splunk's membership roster, probably so they can meet their targets this quarter and the C[A-Z]O's can get their bonuses.

      If that's a sufficient tradeoff for you receiving a shirt plastered with logos and a yet another entity sending you spam for life, OK.
  • I thought that read "a trip to the USA"
  • The Contest is open only to residents of the U.S. and Canada excluding Quebec due to restrictive contest laws.
    • Its quite common on these types of competitions, and I suspect is has more to do with the cose of shiping the prizes...

      At least they didn't call it 'World SysAdmin ...'. A number of years ago Macromedia had a 'World Flash Animation comtetition' with similar rules (though if I recall their vision of the world did include Germany)
  • everyone hates me at my company, let's be frank,,,,,users dont love you unless your company policies are permissive or were and are now more srtict.

    And being granted a title can only be made by other IT who see the work and understand what has to be done even when it pisses people.

    one other problems is that,,,,,,i'm the only one at my company :( and nobody has a clue what i do.

    • I hear ya... good for browsing the web though... As long as no one complains that the "system is down", I'm good
  • Maybe I'm not a SysAdmin but I'm creative. Time to create 100 mail accounts. Send 1 email for me and get the T-Shirt.
    Easy as taking lollipop from a kid!

  • Not their sysadmin (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2006, @10:57AM (#16642621)
    Looks like the site is down. Their sysadmin should now be disqualified.
  • Oh wait, it's because a good BOFH can wrangle free equipment, all expenses paid trips and more without having to win any damn competition.
  • the sys admin for their webserver clearly isn't getting this one, since their server isn't responding.
  • some former co-workers nominated me last week. I got the email and thought it was spam until I saw the prize fulfillment url was a thinkgeek address. clicked the link, signed into my TG account, and received the t-shirt one week later. it says "42" in binary on the front. a good freebie imo.

  • My sysadmin who set up my CVS server for my team and several others.

    I entered a work order which asked for the operating system to be installed, a mirrored filesystem to be installed and backups to be kicked off.

    The work order was completed with the statement "did not set up backups, enter another ticket if you still want those". So the machine has not been backed for all this time (uptime ~1000 days so far).

    Good job we did our own rsync mirroring of the repositories to a reliable NAS device (EMC symmetr

  • I can't even get a decent mod. hint... hint.. btw: outage in 3 mins.

  • This looks like a spam trick (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "By entering the Contest, you agree to allow a Splunk representative to contact you regarding potential sales, case studies and other business matters. In addition, you agree to allow a Splunk representative to contact you regarding your status in the Contest. You also agree to allow Splunk and all sponsors to use your name and employer's name in all the Contest promotional materials including, but not limited to, press releases and presentations."

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