Today we celebrate System Administrator Day!  This holiday falls on the last Friday in July and salutes all of the hard-working sysadmins around the world.

It’s a tough job!  Back in the 90s, I decided I wanted to be a Unix sysadmin.  To me, getting the title of Senior Sysadmin seemed like a cool quest.  As I was spending my weekends reading O’Reilly books, I crossed paths with a woman who said to me “I used to be a Unix sysadmin…but then I got better.”  I couldn’t understand what she could possibly mean.

To me, a Unix server was kind of the ultimate toy.  Tons of different services and programs on it, all kinds of programming languages and scripting tools to learn, security practices to master, and so much more.  I was eagerly spending my nights learning about how to configure email, how bind worked, system startup scripts, the intricacies of disk partitioning, and so many more interesting subjects.  How could this not be a fantastically fun job!?

Then…I got a job as a sysadmin.  Soon after I was getting woken up at 2am by people saying “the system is slow”.  I got emails from Sun telling me that I urgently needed to apply a patch and recompile the kernel because of a security vulnerability, while at the same time being told by management that the server couldn’t be taken offline.  I got tickets from users saying “we need this database job to go faster”.  Not to mention the fact that adding drives in my little home lab when I could mess up and retry was a fun DIY evening…when there’s millions of dollars’ worth of data on the array and you need to do maintenance, there’s a bit more tension in the air.

Being a sysadmin is not easy.  I think those who really excel at the job are kind of born into it.  Some people are going to fool around with servers and reconfigure them and tune them no matter jus for fun, so they might as well make a career of it.

To all of the sysadmins who read this blog and participate in our community, let’s raise a glass.  Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day!

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.