Today, July 28, has been designated as the 7th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day and marks the launch of Sys Admin of the Year – a contest co-sponsored by Splunk, digg.com, Bawls (soda), LOPSA (League of Professional System Administrators, NaSPA (Network and Systems Professionals Association) and USENIX/SAGE (the Advanced Computing Systems Association).

Sysadmin of the Year is a 3-month program inviting business professionals to nominate their company’s system administrator to receive recognition and a prize for their outstanding achievements.

What achievements are those, you ask? Well, you're reading this, aren't you? That means s/he has managed to keep the systems you need to do your job running yet another day. In any data center, that's quite an achievement, given the complexity of the systems involved. If you aren't impressed by that, consider just how many routers, switches, and machines your request went through to get this page and then think about the number of sysadmins involved in making sure each of those touch-points is operational 24x7.

You can nominate your system administrator for their achievements here.

No, they aren't images of the Packers or cheese. I thought I'd share some of the images of the carnage that was the lab in Green Bay last Friday because as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. I think the only word that really describes the carnage early Friday morning is "horror". There's just something very wrong about wading through 2.5" of water to get to your equipment. Kudos to our Cisco Catalyst 6500, which was still running and routing traffic despite the conditions.

We have been working on moving Network Computing's Green Bay lab for more than a year, and last week finally had the opportunity to tour the new lab space as they were building it out.

The reasons for our move were many, most revolving around being in the basement of a building with a sump-pump in it. I have feared a backup of that sump pump since I first came on staff.

Little did I know, that the sump-pump was the least of our worries.

We had a tawdry situation last week with some blatant misuse of company resources. A staff member in our accounting department had a problem with their ACME laptop. This person does a good amount of travel for work and thus we had issued them a laptop instead of a desktop computer. Well --- when one of our PC techs was working on the laptop he noticed a hoard of pron (reverse the R and O). You would think that in this day and age people would realize that such actions are really frowned upon. And we believe we block most of that at the border using our firewall and other products. We figure that this person must have been downloading the pron while they were at home.

Our finance department has a hoard of consultants helping them with a re-audit of our books. As if that is not enough pain for the firm, we in IT have to deal with making sure the mix of mercenaries from these consulting firms can all get their jobs done (meaning, ensure their computers can work on our network). And it is ironic to hear from these consultants in terms of how poorly some of them are supported by their own firms. (read on)

Has anyone else out there in IT corporate world had your company domain spoofed in s-p-a-m emails? Then you get the tons of bounces if you have a catchall address set up. Somebody has been using the ACME email domain for their s-p-a-m-i-t-y s-p-a-m s-p-a-m campaigns for a few weeks now and we started getting tons of bounces due to the thousands of invalid addresses they have in their blasts. Please read on..... (I might be able to use your help).

I had to use the term "swag" since I didn't know how to spell tchotchy (and I still don't). Today I received a postcard today from a vendor of some network product I never heard of and they offer a change to win a t-shirt if you attend their presentation at Networld+Interop. Wow, a chance to win a t-shirt! Oh how the vendor give-a-ways have changed.

Also -- am I the only one getting tired of presentations/registrations that offer a chance to win an iPod? Vendors giving away items must account for 10% of all iPod sales.

I just got back from a few tech events and I only saw one vendor with t-shirts to give away actually. I did get these various items (saves me a ton in trip gifts for the kids): beanie type stuffed animal dog, beach ball (suitable for inflation), some rubix cube ripoff, battery powered light-up pen (for taking notes in meetings with the lights off I assume), a small squishy football (again maybe for use in meetings), a balsa wood toy airplane, a squisky penguin (some Linux vendor), and the usual mix of pens/pads. I also was given a nifty multi-purpose tool which the security scanning wonks promptly took from me upon arrival at the airport.

The t-shirt I did get was good, my other vendor ones are getting thread-bare. This one I gave to my wife as part of my anniversary gift as a gag, it was from an online backup vendor and the text says "Once a Night Is Not Enough". She was not amused.

Convergence, it's big eh? I am attending an IT event in Toronto, Canada. At the same time there are these three events in town all at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. One event is Network World Conference & Expo which is also associated with LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. The other event is the 2005 SAN/NAS Summit. And the last event is VON (Voice On The Net). I took the time to snag the free exhibition badges for each event.

Next month when one of our IT network staff will be attending Networld+Interop in Vegas there are also like two other IT events there, not odd for Vegas I bet.

Cristina Foundation donate your old computers – Cristina Foundation provides computer technology and solutions to give people with disabilities, students at risk and economically disadvantaged persons the opportunity, through training, to lead more independent and productive lives.

See www.cristina.org for more information.

We just finished our annual employee briefings for IT security awareness as required by several regulations and our external auditors -- and of course a good idea in general. Awareness is not training but rather a point where we focus attention on this important topic.

Our IT security manager at ACME, Bucky Rogers, was keen to develop a formal security awareness program. We used various resources and guides to create our overall program. This annual briefing is just one part.

We also take the time to alert employees about new severe threats and use those alerts to remind them of our awareness policy as well as our various security bulletins (useful info) posted on our intranet.

Read on…..

Are you using technology like VMware for production systems or maybe to create yourself a great development environment? The promise of better server utilization is there. We all realize how low processor power is really used by many of our enterprise apps. So why not take advantage of this situation?

The current RealityIT article deals with this. Would be good to hear what you all in the world are doing in terms of server consolidation, virtual servers, and related technology.

Got quite a few emails about my recent article No Profit in a Fast Employee Axe dealing with the situation where we had to eventually fire an IT employee for low performance. As you note from the article subject we want to dig into human elements of our profession at times and not always the tech stuff. This article seemed to hit a chord with many readers. In the extended entry for the blog entry I have some reader comments and some of my responses.

And, bonus prize for the person that can tell me where I came up with the alias of David Lightman. (well, no prize, but I will give you profs here on the blog)

This Apple Xserve RAID box looks simply amazing. I thought about this hardware again as I read Steven Hill's current issue column on IP Storage Devices. Steven looked at storage technology and solutions for mid to small companies. He didn't cover the Apple solution directly but Don MacVittie mentions it in his Survivor's Guide to 2005: Storage and Servers column.

Want to know why I like this Apple system? Small footprint, good performance, fault tolerance, capacity, and price. Check out the reliability built into the architecture. Read on......

With the Survivor's Guide to 2005 NWC issue hot off the presses I wanted to pass on details as to what we are focusing on at ACME in the IT shop for 2005. We have some big multi-year projects still ongoing and some things we started in 2004 as well as new projects for 2005. In the past we made the mistake of approaching budgeting as a "wish list" and then figuring out if we had the staff to execute the projects. This year we took a more realistic approach. Keep reading to see what amazing things we have planned for 2005.

So Tim Wilson at NWC wrote in the current issue about how to negotiate with vendors. And I also noted the article from Don MacVittie about SAN Switches. At ACME we just got finished with a grueling few months of back-and-forth negotiations with SAN vendors.

They call us IT Geeks. We call ourselves Geeks. Well, it sort of fits.

Webopedia even has a definition of Geek.
"Short for computer geek, an individual with a passion for computers, to the exclusion of other normal human interests. Depending on the context, it can be used in either a derogatory or affectionate manner. Basically, geek and nerd are synonymous."

Of course I take exception to that "nerd" being synonymous with geek sentence. In today's world who is not facinated and fixated by information technology to the extent that it makes up part of their human interests? Then again --- we in IT take this a bit further than your normal human.

So Sun announced they will give away Solaris 10 for x86 for free.

Forbes.com story

USA Today story

Amazing -- I had recently begun to push our network team that we might want to consider replacing an Open Source operating system we run for various border systems with Solaris x86.

Here are the folks we have introduced you to in the Reality IT column, names changed to protect the innocent (or guilty in some cases). The names and titles are so you can follow along at home with the postings. These are just some of the folks at ACME, more names will be explained as they are used.

Okay, a slightly misleading title to the blog. What I meant to convey was to see if you think IT departments are properly consulted on system purchases? The IT shop is the place to go for assistance when looking into new systems, we offer free advice (so we don't get left holding the bag later). Do you often feel left out of decisions made by other departments? Like when they start research into alternatives for some new system to meet their needs and don’t even consult IT? Then when we are involved it is often a frustrating situation trying to convince your peer departments within the firm that you are really looking out for their best interests.

When you work up a project plan that requires some network staff effort, do you take into consideration that they are not really available a full 8 hours a day? I have only worked at some places that did proper resourcing in their project management system, whatever application they used. Some project management apps will allow you to take actual calendars into account. I have provided calculations we have used at ACME to determine how much time our network staff really have available for projects and support.

Hello from the pages of Network Computing Magazine and the Reality IT column. Or rather hello from the IT department of ACME located in Metropolis. This is Hunter Metatek, the author of the Reality IT articles in Network Computing. I am an enterprise IT director with over 15 years' experience in network engineering and management. The events chronicled in the print column are based in fact--only the names are fiction. The same will be true of this blog.

You can see some of my past columns online:
- Holey Server, Networkman
- Lessons in Vendor Hype
- IT Never Sleeps
- The Harsh Reality of Disaster Recovery
There are more, just search on Reality IT online at www.nwc.com. You will see a column every few weeks.

Let me know if you have any pain points at work where you want to discuss the issues in this blog through my own experiences, how I can chime in with my anonymous real world examples, and maybe say some things you might not want to be quoted on in a public forum yourself.

HUNTER