August 2, 2010
So…last Friday was SysAdmin Appreciation Day…I’m not sure if you heard or not… 
OpenDNS hosted a party on the West Coast, while we had our shindig here on the East Coast.
I again want to thank Etsy for their generous sponsorship of the event. I haven’t gotten the final numbers from Chris at Etsy, but even with almost 50 people in attendance, we didn’t hit the amount they allocated for us, so to my knowledge, no one ended up buying their own drinks!
If you came, thanks for spending your evening with us. Everyone that I talked to seemed to have a great time, and it’s hard to beat an evening in the company of a few dozen system administrators.
I’m including a slideshow from my Flickr set. Right now, it only includes photos submitted to me by reader Jared Bratu. If you would like yours added to the set, let me know! Also, if you have your photos on Flickr, let me know, and I’ll just create a group for them all.
slideshow disabled due to misbehavior. It’s being punished. Click here for the slideshow at Flickr
Thanks again to Chris and Chad from Etsy, to the staff at The Ginger Man, to the people at OpenDNS for throwing their party, and to everyone who attended our parties. It was great celebrating with you.
I also want to take a second to thank a very special person, without whom these celebrations would never have happened. His name is Ted Kekatos, and if you’ve never heard of him, you’re not alone…he keeps a low profile for someone who has affected so many people. It’s not a coincidence that he’s the owner of SysAdminDay.com…he started it. He dreamed up the idea, spread the word, and did the hard work. If you have a twitter account, you might want to follow him (@tedkekatos) and thank him what he has done for system administration.
Until next year, I hope you had a great SysAdmin Appreciation Day. And now, back to our normally scheduled blog….
Posted in General 
3 Comments »
July 30, 2010
If you’re reading this, you’re probably an IT administrator of some sort (or want to be one). So thank you. Thank you for making your own part of the internet go. Sure, I’m an administrator, but I also use the internet, and without people like yourself, I wouldn’t be able to write this page, or make a telephone call, or talk to people on IM or twitter, or do any one of a countless number of things that I take for granted every day.
Thank you to all of the system, network, telephony, storage, application, and general IT administrators out there who make our modern life possible.
Posted in General 3 Comments »
July 29, 2010
Last night, I got an email out of the blue. It was from Chris Munns, sysadmin at Etsy, the home to a huge online community of people who make and sell things. The email basically asked if there was any way that Etsy could help sponsor the SysAdmin Appreciation Day event! Excellent.
The only question in my mind was, what kind of sponsorship would our event need? In the end, it winds up being a bunch of system administrators sitting around drinking, swapping war stories. I told them as much, and Chris responded:
Hey Matt,
Chad Dickerson who is the CTO here at Etsy was actually the one who wanted to us to help sponsor/participate. We were wondering if maybe we could just throw some money in for drinks on behalf of Etsy?
- Chris
Pick up some of the bar tab? Well, ok!
After some more discussion, we’ve got it settled down, and I am happy to say that Etsy is contributing a very significant amount towards our bar tab tomorrow. I’m not going to say how much just yet, because I haven’t worked out how it’s going to be handled, but I’ll be surprised if anyone ends up paying for a drink themselves.
A huge(!) thank you to Etsy! And if you’re wondering why a site largely dedicated to crafting cares this much about the community of System Administrators, you should read their blog, Code As Craft. They believe strongly in Dev/Ops cooperation, and they spend a lot of time on that blog discussing their infrastructure. If you’re interested in Hadoop installations and continuous deployments, I recommend you check it out.
If you were holding back because you didn’t want to spend the dough on drinks, then don’t be afraid any longer. Check out the event page, then register!
Posted in General 6 Comments »
July 28, 2010
…do we have an appropriate award for doing bad work?
I’m only asking, because today on reddit, I came across an amazing post.
There is a subreddit called IAMA, where you can submit a thread allowing people to ask you questions because you are, in some way, unusual or interesting. The thread I found was called “IAMA Wildly Incompetent Network Security Admin and have no business in my job“.
The job? He’s network security for a Vegas casino.
When you actually click on the thread, it gets way, way worse. There’s a summary at the top, so I’m stealing some and pasting here. This is all copyright of reddit user throwawayscared, I don’t want it.
Since alot of people are asking this question: The reason I dont spend time learning the job is partly due to laziness. I mean it’s awesome spending all day playing battlefieldheroes or transformice.
I refuse to wear my ID badge so people dont stop and ask me questions. I’ve been reprimanded and even warranted the CEO sending out a memo that stated ‘EVERYONE HAS TO WEAR THEIR BADGE’ and I still dont do it. I just changed my schedule to leave earlier than any execs and get in after they do so they never see me without it.
also working at a casino means you get free lunches too. we’re only supposed to eat once, but i go several times throughout the day. I once changed the settings on the turnstyle applicatoin to allow me unlimited cafeteria entries. Everyone else was set at 1. The benefits of admin passwords
To further prove how much I should be fired, I’d like to share a quick story with you. I have stolen every bit of computer shit I can get my hands on. When the security team started cracking down on thieving employees and searching us on the way out, I just started mailing the shit to my house through the mailroom. Then I just started listing shit on ebay and sending it to the buyers right through the same mailroom. I also convinced the mailroom dude that I should’t pay for postage. I’m not proud, but I’m certainly not ashamed.
wow. It’s like a trainwreck.
Please, don’t be this guy.
Posted in General 9 Comments »
July 23, 2010
Just a quick reminder that if you’re in the New York City area next Friday, then you should come celebrate System Administrator Appreciation Day with us at The Gingerman. It’s on the east side of Manhattan, on 36th street. It’s an easy walk from Grand Central Terminal, and not too far from Penn Station, either.
Come one, come all. Raise a pint to…well…ourselves!
Note: You don’t have to sign up to show up, but it helps me keep track of how many people will be there. Significant Others Welcome!
Posted in General 1 Comment »
July 21, 2010
This is probably not quite the news that Dell wanted to get…
According to an article at The Register, Dell service has shipped replacement motherboards that contained spyware, presumably placed there at the manufacturing site.
The original post on the Dell Community Forums has this quote from a Dell rep:
As part of Dell’s quality process, we have identified a potential issue with our service mother board stock, like the one you received for your PowerEdge R410, and are taking preventative action with our customers accordingly. The potential issue involves a small number of PowerEdge server motherboards sent out through service dispatches that may contain malware. This malware code has been detected on the embedded server management firmware as you indicated.
We take matters of information security very seriously and believe that any impact to a customer’s information security is unlikely. To date we have received no customer reports related to data security. Systems running non-Windows operating systems are not vulnerable to this malware and this issue is not present on motherboards shipped new with PowerEdge systems.
We have assembled a customer list and are directly contacting customers like you through a call campaign. On the call, you should be provided a phone number to call if you have additional questions. Hopefully you received this on your call. If not, let me know and we’ll get it to you as soon as possible so you have all of the follow-up information needed.
Dell’s apparently being proactive about it…but what other option do they have? “Our factory-supplied boards come enhanced with spyware” isn’t exactly the ideal sales pitch.
If you have recently gotten a replacement motherboard for a new gen Dell PowerEdge, you might want to call your rep to make sure you’re not affected.
Posted in General 3 Comments »
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