Confessions of a SysAdmin Daily Struggles: The working life of a System Administrator \ brought to you by = ¢ i » ieConfessions of a SysAdmin Daily Struggles: The working life of a System Administrator As a celebration of Sysadmin day we wanted to gather interesting and funny stories that have happened to System Administrators in their everyday working lives. We have gathered the best stories that we received and present them to you in this free eBook for your enjoyment! brought to you by @iCodeyy Daily Struggles: The working life of a System Administrator If it’s got an electrical plug on it, it’s IT. | was asked to travel to another Cen Ea eeueeucmtuk aCe cca: io cutcad Politely told the young lady to “jog on” “Ihardcode far too many things into our pipelines...” “That one time a second DHCP server took down the network.” De ed gee eh Loe brought to you by @iCode ryDaily Struggles: The working life of a System Administrator When the office gets too noisy from coworkers talking loudly, I'll text a certain manager who sends in a ticket complaining her laptop is having problems. This generally takes 10 minutes to a few hours to fix, depending on how long my coworkers are going to be annoying me in my own office. I've been doing this for about two years now. She’s also one of the most senior staff so nobody questions if I’m fixing her stuff. “once accidentally brought down the website of our biggest event during peak season for 4 hours. | recovered it from a backup and kept my mouth shut. No one mentioned any downtime.” Ese B Soe E-WoRKeo in Vl meee A Ca COR laeal} and boss started shouting what is happening!” ST VAS ne Naor Dre eg @iCodetr The working life of a System Administrator My chair was at the perfect height to press the reset button on that Hp server that was production. People came running and saw me working on the desk so | was not blamed.. | didn't know what had happened either.. Until that same day | heard a distinct ‘click’ sound again when I moved my chair... | think Hp had to a the “faulty” server. “lcut the wrong wire once and|blamed someone else.” Dela eee ueMe eR Mages oe Wrenn Aue aceon We rok R crete ma ear Lee a ee to ao) Uo ud eRe YL b° BLDaily Sale eat working life of a System Administrator Servers all required updates, scheduled it for 6pm on a Friday 11/2 hours after everyone had left. Checked the building multiple times for people, had sent multiple emails in the days before informing everyone that the servers were going to be offline from 6pm but would all be back up and running for 8am on Monday. Started restarting all the hyper vs hosted servers and the hosts at which point the director of the institution walked in and told me of a board meeting that was taking place at 6:30. | had spoken to him directly about the work that | was going to be doing at least 4 times that day and he hadn’t thought to mention it. He couldn’t access the file server until 7pm and in the minutes for the meeting | was personally named as a reason the meeting started late. “I've set a time-bomb once just to look my boss call me for help and refuse because | was on holiday (got 2 month of holiday in backlog and gave me only 5 days off).” “I test in production on Fridays.” brought to you by GiCode% Daily Struggles: The working life of a System Administrator lle Nell EN Tole To RRR kel A et oR el od in a mysql database from dd-mm-yyyy to yyyy-mm-dd and updated all existing fields. The purpose was to annoy a co-worker. “Alcohol does not help any more.” STs ncaa ed a ake ccm tweet Poteet aetna al ST re nearest road eM ae PA a Rattle Oe] Mee Ca MTing tater cg mage TOM Sees ene acai Nea we emo d Kueh cael curls Cota arenes Minne Ne seule men tas Prose ome iar lank real brought to yeu iby lol Tereye(-Daily Struggles: The working life of a System Administrator lonce had a user who, no matter what | did, found problems and he was not shy about telling me how inept I was. | had access to the voicemail system and slowed all of his voicemails to half speed. Easily the most passive aggressive thing I’ve ever done. pal "My boss once asked me to create a single executable that users can run on a Windows as well as a Mac. | made it clear how that request sounds to me.” "| disabled SELinux when | first started professionally and forgot to set it back up later on tons or servers.” aero a ocolel a SCR TT LOTT ereyel->) ie e working life of a System Administrator One night I was reconfiguring a RAID system, back in the days when GUIs UTE Meet ao Rt lie oR e ee ee ee The software used to reconfigure the RAID was contrary, so highlighted your selection by making it the same as the screen background as ee RM CR huh eA hae Red blue/pale blue. It was late on Friday, my wingman and | were tired. We double checked we had the correct array selected for formatting... Oh dear, looks like we are having a disaster recovery exercise on Tuesday when we get back to work (it was a bank holiday).... Much beer OCR Rel LACT o “Informing users that this is a known ID-10T error but it is resolvec Fe er oe nga y Manes c Ua ck eh ea ee Rg GiCode . \MRR Cored edad to write bad code PUTO ay Cray ad Cn ee ad ore Reena en eee ne en coy Shop 4 ee ee pmo ery oo reas Gooo Coco] eee erty