6 wishes for SysAdmin Appreciation Day

Yes, SysAdmin Appreciation Day is a thing, founded by system administrator Ted Kekatos and first celebrated on July 28, 2000 — and subsequently observed the last Friday in July ever since. Reportedly it’s kind of a big deal in Russia. And why not? All long-suffering peoples deserve their own day of celebration.

Mothers get flowers, chocolate, and breakfast in bed. Fathers get ties, power tools, and craft beer. Sys admins get … O’Reilly books? Energy drinks? Nerf guns? Actually, high-calorie foods top the list of traditional offerings. But maybe we can do a bit better this year. Maybe we can give sysadmins a voice and allow them to ask for what they really want.

Wish No. 1: Let us have some input into high-level system decisions

Too many times, decisions are made on high that have no bearing on the reality of a server and system infrastructure. A golf game leads to a contract for an application that will bring all kinds of beauty and wealth to the company … well, except for the fact that it doesn’t interface with anything currently in use, and it will cost two to three times more to implement than expected. We sys admins are left to deal with the consequences and figure out how to fit the square peg in the round hole. Here’s a better idea: Involve those who know the infrastructure best and give them input into these decisions so we can all head off horrifying integrations problems at the pass.

Wish No. 2: Remember that poor planning on your part does not constitute a crisis on our part While related to Wish No. 1, this disconnect occurs further down the food chain. It involves frantic calls and cubicle visits from users (usually developers) who suddenly realize that what they’ve been working on for weeks or months isn’t going as well as they’d hoped, and they need massive infrastructure changes to certain components to compensate for their lack of understanding and planning. Or better yet, some business unit has a sudden need for an entire application infrastructure that was heretofore unknown and unaccounted for. Naturally, they need it by the end of the day.

When this kind of thing happens, we can’t just drop everything and work 20-hour days to fix your mistake. Please understand that — and don’t throw a temper tantrum to the IT director. It only makes you look like a fool.

Wish No. 3: When we ask for specific workstation hardware, don’t equivocate — just give it to us Details as common and simple as dual monitors can make the sys admin’s job much easier. While we wend our way through the infrastructure every day, we have to run myriad apps at the same time, including the helpdesk app, email, a bevy of terminals and/or RDP windows, IM windows, and so on. Most of the time, we need to have all of these open at the same time, and we need to reference information in one while working in another. A system powerful enough to handle this without balking is non-negotiable. A dual-monitor setup is also non-negotiable. We aren’t asking for the world on a string, just enough power and desktop space to keep ourselves sane.

Wish No. 4: Users, please have some sort of understanding that security is important The password on a sticky note on the monitor is bad enough, but users seem to think that system security is both someone else’s problem and a thorn in their sides. So users complain about password complexity rules, while also using their corporate email and password as login information on any number of external sites, releasing those credentials into the wild where security depends on the weakest (or shadiest) site. No matter how we try to mitigate this problem, human nature has a way of foiling security practices, and we wind up with holes in the system that we have no way of preventing.

In short, while there are plenty of user stupid user tricks regarding security, please, never use your corporate email and/or password for anything other than corporate use — never, ever, ever.

Wish No. 5: Don’t assume we sit around loafing when your support request is dealt with quickly Occasionally, we’ll get a request from a user that the user thinks is really complex. In reality, we’ve written a script to take care of requests just like it, so it only takes us a few seconds to run the script with the appropriate variables, and the ticket is closed. We usually do this while we’re working on some other hairy problem that will take us hours to deal with. When we see an “easy” ticket come through, we’ll knock it off the list quickly because we don’t really know how much longer the other ticket will take. When that happens, just be thankful, not suspicious. Also, please stop asking us to fix your personal laptops. We’re too busy for that.

Wish No. 6: Don’t ask us to violate the laws of physics, as we are not actual wizards Frequently, we get requests from users on every side of the company for things that are simply, clearly impossible. These range from a user asking us to restore a file that only ever existed on the personal laptop he sold a few years ago to a VP demanding that we double the computational power for an application without adding any resources whatsoever.

We understand that not everyone knows as much about computing as we do, but we would hope that at some point, some sort of logic and reason would preclude the question. However flattering it may be to have someone think we can alter the laws of the universe, questions like these just serve to increase our resentment toward humankind.

Well, there are our six wishes. There are many others. Got some of your own for SysAdmin Appreciation Day?

This story, “6 wishes for SysAdmin Appreciation Day,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Paul Venezia’s The Deep End blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.