System Administrator Appreciation Day

System Admin Appreciation Day falls on the last Friday in July, and today is the day. Most of the people who read Astroroach are probably well aware of the lifestyle of a system admin (if you can call that living) but for those of you who live in blissful ignorance of how important they are, here's a reminder.

If you can read this, thank your system admin

"A sysadmin installed the routers, laid the cables, configured the networks, set up the firewalls, and watched and guided the traffic for each hop of the network that runs over copper, fiber optic glass, and even the air itself to bring the Internet to your computer. All to make sure the webpage found its way from the server to your computer.

A sysadmin makes sure your network connection is safe, secure, open, and working. A sysadmin makes sure your computer is working in a healthy way on a healthy network. A sysadmin takes backups to guard against disaster both human and otherwise, holds the gates against security threats and crackers, and keeps the printers going no matter how many copies of the tax code someone from Accounting prints out.

A sysadmin worries about spam, viruses, spyware, but also power outages, fires and floods."

There's more. The 2am pages. The late nights and weekends. Living their entire lives on-call. I don't know if people who don't work in Information Technology understand how much it takes to keep these systems up and running. So, say thanks to your system administrator today - and every day.