Nominate SysAdmin of the Year By Oct. 12

PMcGovern writes "Deadline for nominations for SysAdmin of the Year 2007 is this Friday Oct. 12. The award is sponsored by Slashdot, SourceForge, Digg, Usenix, Lopsa, Splunk, and Naspa. The first 2500 sysadmins nominated win a free SysAdmin Rockstar tee shirt. Prizes include a MacBook Pro, a non-bricked Apple iPhone, Gibson guitar, Splunk license, a full-paid trip to the LISA conference, cases of Red Bull, and more. If you know a sysadmin that goes beyond the call of duty, nominate them."

bofh == win

[User 956]

I nominate this guy [iinet.net.au]

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[dgun]

Cooper?

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[dgun]

Cooper [youtube.com]

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[nonos]

How can you be sure that the Ubuntu packages weren't backdoored ?

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[razorh]

what? you have time to jog?

And here I thought it was just that most sysadmins didn't have time to eat.. hrmmm...

I nominate Eikonoklastes

[eikonoklastes]

Seeing as sysadmins are the ones reading slashdot, I foresee a tonne of self nominations.

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[speedingant]

Like mine. Pick me pick me pick me!

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[El_Muerte_TDS]

If you have time reading /. then why isn't Exchange operating properly? I still can't sync my PDA or log in through owa.
Because of you slacking I can't do much right now. The only thing I can do is read /. and wait for things to get fixed.

wait a minute...

I vote for Eikonoklastes.

USA and Canada only

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't this be called "north-american SysAdmin of the year", considering they only accept nominees from two countries...?

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[walshy007]

The context is usually gotten from where it is used, in your example of McDonald's employee of the month, you are only likely to see that in said store, if used anywhere else that store would either be implied beforehand, otherwise the name of the store specifically said.

In the case of slashdot, this is an international website, a significant portion of users come from countries other than the US. and thus it makes sense to assume an award by slashdot, digg, sourceforge etc, would be international, for all

Who me?

[ender-]

I guess it wouldn't be very sportsman-like to nominate myself. Of course, it would also be a horrible lie, since I'm a pretty mediocre SysAdmin at best. :)

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[timmarhy]

let me guess you submitted a story about your barbie doll collection and your annoyed it got rejected. jealousy is such an ugly emotion.

An unbricked iPhone?

[McNally]

Surely the sysadmin of the year should be able to unbrick their own iPhone..

I norminate my system admin

[jsse]

because he put scripts to delete all emails with subjects like "CONGRATZ YOU WON A FREE IPHONE FOR BEING THE ADMIN OF THE YEAR BY /.!!!!", so he'd probably won't get the prize anyway.

Sis, add men!

[Itninja]

I nominated myself for the sole purpose of registering for something who's male 'model' is fatter and uglier than I am. Sold!

I nominate home Windows admins

[jesser]

... for selflessly pooling their resources to create what is perhaps the largest distributed computing project ever, the Storm botnet [wikipedia.org].

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[rts008]

Yeah, I was going to nominate myself for this award, but when you put it that way....well, I have to concede to MS's Junk-fu.
But does the Storm botnet run Linux?...No?, well I guess I am SOL here.
The win goes to MS botNets, hands down.

I'll bet SETI@Home would love this kind of power- too bad it's relegated to Windows spambotnets.

Thankfully I have lost track of this shite since I have been running Kubuntu since 5.10.(now on 7.04, and no problems!)

Yes, I caught the recent article about the cracked Linux boxes

fie gentlemen, fie

[meliux]

"The Contest is open only to residents of the U.S. and Canada..."

well bugger that. Here I was expecting an all-expenses-paid-for-round-the-world-trip, but no... I can't even make an "all I got was this lousy t-shirt" comment.

and from TA - and then, not including Quebec

[Typoboy]

"excluding Quebec due to restrictive contest laws." Why? A quick search turned up this [advertisinglawyer.ca], this [searchwarp.com] and this [gouv.qc.ca]. Interesting.

America IS THE WORLD stupid!

[skipau]

It appears that only American's and Canadian's can be SysAdmin of the year... I guess that America "Is the World" anyway so... you can't complain that much - otherwise they will put a cap in ya ass!

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[MollyB]

Interesting. AC made this post [slashdot.org] twenty-seven minutes prior to yours. Marvelous coincidence? I realize that slashdot users overseas get irked over this site's (North) American slant, but it carries political correctness to absurdity if the contest/publicity stunt were made international. The criteria by which sysadmins in say, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc., might be the opposite of what westerners value. Sysadmins in this hemisphere largely facilitate connectivity for the user, while those in the nat

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[MollyB]

Interesting choice of countries.

I've been brainwashed by CNN.

Having worked in similar locations I can tell you sysadmins are valued on pretty much the same criteria.

I happily stand corrected. Thanks.

Whom would I nominate? The unpaid.

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably the sysadmins who do it for free (NGO's), under fire (Iraq, Afganistan, Sudan, Rwanda (I'm going there to do IT work next year) and China (pro-freedom anti-communist NGOs).

I think it's pretty obvious who should win....

[Wescotte]

I nominate one Wesley Crusher

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[arbitraryaardvark]

I nominate one Wesley Crusher
Done.
wil wheaton
[e-mail]
monolith press

1) really is a rock star.
2) plays mean guitar hero
3) adminsters systems well.
4) rules the earth
5) has clever nick name
6) gave pax keynote
7) insane DIY cred

MacBook??

[Anonymous Coward]

How many sysAdmins use MacBooks!?

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[tabacco]

Me? Well, technically I use a G4 iBook, so I could use that Macbook.

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[Tsunayoshi]

My brand spanking new Macbook Pro just came in yesterday...replacing my Powerbook G4

Nobody here deserves it

[drharris]

If you're reading this, it means you don't deserve to win this award.

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[laejoh]

hehehe, later they'll say:

Only six people on Slashdot knew that the title of the Sysadmin of the Year was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it.

With humble apologies to a certain D. Adams of course

Stupid contest

[mcrbids]

Really, the best sysadmin is one so good that he/she/it doesn't appear to do much of anything at all - because that's exactly what he/she/it should be doing. Who is really going to nominate a guy who seems to just sit around while everything around him seems to work just perfectly?

Thus, the contest is biased. You'll either get:

A) The guy that always seems "industrious", nominated by people who aren't sysadmins, or

B) The guy that seems "lazy", sits around not doing much at all while dozens to hundreds of carefully written scripts fire off all day long, sending an occasional message when an error condition is detected. Since this guy would have to be nominated by a sysadmin, and sysadmins are in the minority, this contest is biased in favor of the incompetent.

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[fyoder]

B) The guy that seems "lazy", sits around not doing much at all while dozens to hundreds of carefully written scripts fire off all day long, sending an occasional message when an error condition is detected. Since this guy would have to be nominated by a sysadmin, and sysadmins are in the minority, this contest is biased in favor of the incompetent.

It's probably a problem that could be overcome by a perl script of only a few lines, but I not only seem lazy, I AM lazy. Though the free shirt would be nice...

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[Bluesman]

A sufficiently intelligent Perl script of a few lines could nominate you over and over by October 12th.

If you could have it also be the winning entry of the obfuscated Perl contest, then you'd win for sure, and deservedly so.

May the best sysadmin win.

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[blhack]

Yes, yes, yes yes, and YES!!!

YES! I cannot TELL you how many times i've had to explain this to people. I get to sit in my office and play with my lin box all day because of all the time i spent when we first got started organizing everything, and making sure that everything was setup CORRECTLY!

Some people in my company/industry hate me because I'm 20 (I started here when i was 19) and I'm the admin of a medium sized business (we have about 200 employees). What they don't understand is that the reason why

Me!

[Joce640k]

I'm the best!

help!

[AlgorithMan]

Who's Googles main Admin? I want to nominate him - just to destroy some chairs in redmond...

A nominee from Eastern Europe

[Erikderzweite]

A couple of years ago a friend of mine asked me for an advice. He has just started to work as a sysadmin at some middle-sized bank. They have had a lot of *NIX servers that were working just fine. But there was also one Windows NT-based server there with a *very* special application which was absolutely crucial for bank's business processes. The very special "feature" of this application was that it crashed quite often and took the whole server to the realm of BSODs with every crash. The old sysadmin was working in the server room and has had no problem resetting the server manually if needed. My friend, however, preferred remote administration from his sunny office (yea, i know, how weird it sounds :) ) so walking down to server room in order to restart a server was hardly an option for him.
Fixing a program was not possible - no source code was available.

After a weirdest brainstorming i have ever participated at, he finally found a solution - he has built together a crappy PC with linux 2.4 on board and connected it to the server via a crossover cable.
The sole task of this PC was to ping the alleged server and if it wasn't responding - eject /dev/hdc.
The cd-rom drive opened itself and pressed the Reset button on the server. Fool-proofed system and the funniest linux-based solution to solve windows proglems I've seen in my life.

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[Erikderzweite]

A very creative solution to say the least. Although, it sounds to me that this isn't a "Windows" problem as much as it is the unstable application that's bringing the system down. Either way, the solution is impressive.

I just couldn't resist and add some "lin vs. win" salt to the story.

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[Sourcehack]

funniest thing i've read here in a long while.

I nominate...

[Lexical_Scope]

Kim Jong Il [theregister.co.uk]

But...

[jellomizer]

Isn't he best sysadmin the one you don't know is there. I find in general Bad Sysadmins are the ones complaining all the time, and always working very hard with fires, Complain about the pager because they know it will go off. While good sysadmins are rarely seen unless they want to be so. Because they have the organization running so well and smooth that most problems are preemptively fixed, the ones that are not have enough backup and fail over that he can fix without disrupting anyone else's work. That is a good sysadmin... The problem with that is they are also the first ones to be considered for layoffs because they don't seem to be working hard... But they learn in a couple of months that his job was necessary.

I vote for my SysAdmit

[vitalyb]

My sysadmin told me to vote for him or he'll post my internet logs and rape my user permissions.

Ok, slam me

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Ok, I'm going to risk a massive Troll slam, but my trigger finger's just too itchy.

> Nominate SysAdmin of the Year

With real programmers around, isn't this kind of like the NIT tournament, the battle to be the 65th best college basketball team in the country?

I nominate this guy.

[DiezMilScoville]

http://www.chemistrius.com/ [chemistrius.com] He's gotta get his main site back online .. *hint*.