We’re hanging out the bunting here at Naked Security and we can’t believe how fast #SysAdminDay has come round again! It barely seems any time at all since we were last reminding you that IT system administrators, who keep all our systems running and who daily save us from not only bugs and issues but also from ourselves, deserve your appreciation today – and of course, every day.
To mark the day, we’ve prepared a handy #SysAdminDay guide to your sysadmins’ favourite programming languages so that you can share their fervour with them, win their favour and jump to the front of the IT support queue every time. (You might not want to tell your friends about our guide, though – otherwise they’ll be queue-jumping in front of you.)
And for those of you who are sysadmins and want to explain to Muggles what you do and why you deserve love and respect, check out this excellent video.
(Can’t see the video directly above this line? Watch on Facebook instead.)
Later on today we’ll be posting a quiz to see if you’ve got the IT chops to consider yourself up there with the sysadmins – watch this space!
(The quiz is now up: Are you a Sysadmin? Find out now for free!)
Just to remind you of what your friendly neighbourhood sysadmin is up against, here’s a glimpse of what a Sophos sysadmin gets up to during the day, and we’d also urge you to revisit Mark Stockley’s guide to how you, a technology Muggle, sound to a sysadmin.
We really appreciate sysadmins here at Naked Security: they’re the heroes who keep Sophos running smoothly. So take some time to show some love to your own sysadmins, whether it’s the person in the office who makes sure a printer meltdown doesn’t stop you hitting deadlines or whether it’s your offspring – or parent! – who’s keeping your home IT purring along.
Have you got a sysadmin you’d like to big up to us? Let us know in the comments who your sysadmin hero is.
Martin Feuerstein
“And for those of you who are sysadmins and want to explain to Muggles what you do and why you deserve love and respect, check out this excellent video.” – the video is missing, right?
Paul Ducklin
It’s there, embedded right in the article, but you might not see it if you have various content-blocking browser plugins, or a company firewall that suppresses facebook DOT com (which is where it’s hosted).
I have added a link into the article so you can try visiting it in a browser tab of its own (which might make it clearer why it is not appearing), or watch from another computer on a different network.
For the record, this is the URL, transcoded so it isn’t a workable URL :-)
https COLON SLASH SLASH facebook DOT com SLASH securitybysophos SLASH videos SLASH 1442065572551035 SLASH
Anonymous
In case there are some who can get to YouTube but not Facebook, the video is also on YouTube.
https COLON SLASH SLASH youtube DOT com SLASH watch QUESTION v=cfUSjgL7lwk
Anonymous
“hanging out the bunting”?????
Paul Ducklin
It’s an Anglicism.
Bunting refers to those cheery strings of coloured flags and pennants that you stretch merrily across your street from lamppost to lamppost when it’s Her Majesty’s jubilee, or when England win the World Cup (it happens).
I think that’s right. (By that I mean I think that’s what bunting is, not that I think it happens that England sometimes win World Cups. And by that I don’t mean I don’t think England has ever won a World Cup. And by that I mean I know that England *has* won World Cups of several sorts, though I can’t immediately remember any of them. Ah, Rugby Union, 2003. That’s my existence proof. Oh, and Association Football, 1966.)
Kate Bevan
That is the best description of bunting I’ve ever seen, Duck!
Paul Ducklin
Well, it wasn’t in my faithful Oxford Dictionary of English, although that turned out to be because I had set the macOS dictionary applet into Thesaurus mode by mistake, so I panicked.