It’s #SysAdminDay, and although most of us think we know what sysadmins are, it’s easy to make mistakes.
Some people say that if you yourself think you are a sysadmin, then ipso facto you are not; similarly, that if you think you are not a sysadmin, then ipso facto you are not.
(This does not leave the set of all sysadmins empty: if you form no personal opinion about whether you are a sysadmin or not, then it is clearly still possible for you to be one. Or not.)
We thought we’d try to sort out the confusion using a classification technique called “feature extraction”, which is where you try to identify those parts of an object that are sufficient on their own to differentiate between, say, documents and spreadsheets, or between malware and goodware…
…or between sysadmins and, well, other people,
Take our quick quiz and find out for sure
Here goes: choose one of A, B or C for each of the five questions below. (You must choose the closest answer each time – don’t skip a question because your own perfect answer isn’t listed.)
You don’t need to keep track of which answer you gave to what question – just count the number of times you said each of A, B and C.
1. A healthy breakfast is:
A. A bowl of cereal.
B. Smashed avocado on pumpernickel.
C. C8H10N4O2.
2. A purposeful weekend that benefits those around me includes:
A. Mowing the lawn.
B. Visiting a craft brewery.
C. Call of Duty.
3. My favourite computer is:
A. Latest model iPhone.
B. iMac (2003 model year, purple variant).
C. No favourites. I love my whole botnet.
4. The coolest sort of transport is:
A. Ford Focus ST.
B. Fixed-gear bicycle.
C. SSH.
5. On a first date, I wear:
A. Chinos, boat shoes, 100% cotton T-shirt.
B. Skinny jeans, paisley button-down, vintage brogues.
C. Doesn’t matter, I keep the webcam on my face.
Find out about yourself
Here’s what your answers mean:
Cui Bono
Real Sysadmins already have a browser add-in to rotate images!
Along with all sorts of other customisations that are very occasionally useful.
Mahhn
real sysadmin, read in every direction without thinking about it :P
Andrew Ludgate
Nice to see that I still rate as a SysAdmin years after I exited the profession :) At least products are getting easier to use for sysadminning friends and family on a volunteer basis :)
Well done those of you who bridge the gap between keeping our systems (mostly) happy and keeping their analog interfaces (mostly) happy!
Mike
You all know that on question 5 the “A” answer should be the “C” answer :).
Anonymous
Only if you are talking about the uniform….
Tracy
The answers to Question A should have been….
A: Beer
B: Cold Pizza
C: C8H10N4O2. (Caffeine) And LOTS of it.
Paul Ducklin
To have cold pizza available for breakfast implies that someone neglected to eat it at 2am when it was hot.
Can that happen?
Tracy
Aye Mate, it is possible. When you spend over 24 hours in the closet trying to keep an antiquated server rack from eating its own tail you only get to eat a slice between cascade failures. If you have pizza left for breakfast then you can calculate the Mean Time before Next Failure for your report to the Boss.
Paul Ducklin
If your rules allow food *in* a server room then they ought also to allow food (flat food, at any rate) *on* a server, to act like a warmer drawer, but without the drawer.
Cui Bono
Surely that should be on a platter?
Guy
Maybe it’s all flash these days?
Paul Ducklin
If you were truly stuck in the server room for 24 hours with not even enough time for a slice of pizza…
…I would rather not know about the toilet arrangements.
Anonymous
If the pizza was finished at 2 AM then there wasn’t enough of it.
Paul Ducklin
What someone should do is make it possible to order pizza from your mobile phone, or over the internet. The next step would be to have people on fixed-gear bicycles paid depressingly modest sums to deliver it to you as fast as possible in an insulated, errrrr, thing. Bag.
Tracy
To answer your questions and concerns Mate, food is not allowed in the closet (server room) so I had to leave in order to eat. That is why I had pizza left. Since the server never ran long enough to get hot, thus the cold pizza. As for the bathroom breaks, they were not in my contract so I had to make due. You just have to think outside the bag, ummm…box. At any rate, I hope everyone who depends on a SysAdmin will remember how important they are and leave little treats and bowls of beer outside their cubicle for the little Elf who keeps the network running. :)