We have an unwritten internal policy where we try not to give new joiners the same first name as someone in upper management.

For example, if our CEO’s name is Don and a new hire is also named Don, we politely ask whether they have a middle name they normally use. Alternatively, if their name is long enough, we may use a shortened version for their email address.

I also know someone in the office who is referred to by their middle name at work, even though their friends call them by their first name.

Is this an ego thing from upper management, and are we, Shitty Sysadmins, allowing this practice to continue?

But her son does IT security for the DOD, gas, electric, and water companies.

I'll start. We have one genius who notoriously never responds to any of your questions after submitting a ticket, but as soon as you close it, she immediately emails you saying the issue is still ongoing and the ticket shouldn't have been closed.

And if you somehow manage to get her attention and find a time to look into the issue, the moment things start working for her, you'll never hear from her again. Not even bothered to confirm if it works after you've explicitly asked her to do so just so you can close the ticket.

I can't say I've ever lost a loved one in a server crash. That's a new one for me. Posting here because it's interesting even if weird. Maybe don't be shitty in the comments.

WooHoo!!!

In a now deleted thread, somebody posted asking about how to handle that rockstar employee who knows everything.

Of course everyone rushed into the thread, breathlessly proclaiming that they were indeed that indispensable admin. In predictable fashion, posters patted themselves on the back for being the only one who is curious and willing to see a ticket through, everyone else is an idiot devoid of curiosity, unwilling to learn and escalates everything beyond a password reset. Cross train? Document? You might as well be asking me to chew on broken glass.

But it got weirder than that, posters fantasized about AI taking their colleagues' jobs or even servicing their wives??

Why is r/sysadmin like this? Is this just a reddit thing? You'd think people would have the self awareness to realize if EVERYONE around you is an idiot, maybe it's time for some reflection, but nope. These same people also complain that their job is killing them and it's unfair that they are a single point of failure, yet they seem to relish it and do their best to gatekeep their role.

We've had like, 12 sysadmins die in the last year, seems like a lot right? I know whats up with that.

Anyways we are hiring! Oncall required, 15+ years working with lotus notes, Also kubernetes, and windows sysadmin work.

Thanks!

• Do you have experience literally extinguishing a production environment?
• What is the difference between Disaster Recovery and Damage Assessment?
• What is the RTO for a data center after a direct drone hit?
• Can you debug infrastructure using satellite imagery?
• What would you do if your Kubernetes cluster suddenly became "bare metal" in the literal sense?
• How do you configure HPA so that pods can outrun drones?
• What would you do if not just a node, but the entire data center went down?
• Explain the difference between a Blue-Green Deployment and a "Red" air raid alert.
• How do you interpret the term "hot standby" if the backup data center is still on fire?
• What Prometheus alert would you set up for smoke coming from the server room?
• Have you ever migrated infrastructure using kubectl evacuate?
• What do you do if terraform destroy was executed without Terraform?
• Can a drone strike on the server room be considered a successful Chaos Engineering experiment?
• How many nines of availability remain for the service after losing two data centers?
• How do you distinguish a DDoS attack from an attack that renders a DDoS attack unnecessary?
• What do you do if your disaster recovery plan begins with the words "find a surviving server"?
• How do you explain to management that an Availability Zone is no longer available?
• Which metric do you choose for your SLO: uptime, MTTR, or the number of surviving racks?
• How do you ensure geo-redundancy when geography itself has become the primary risk factor?
• What do you do if you have an Active-Active setup, but both sites have switched to an Inactive-Inactive state?
• How do you configure fencing in a cluster when the fencing has already occurred physically?
• What do you do if your Witness in the third data center is the first to stop showing signs of life?
• Can a storage system be considered fault-tolerant if the data outlived the hardware, but the hardware didn't survive its operational lifespan?
• How do you calculate the "blast radius" when it’s no longer just a metaphor from the documentation?
• What is the point of synchronous replication if both data centers cease to exist synchronously?
• How do you implement automatic failover when the decision to switch over is made by the Ministry of Emergency Situations?
• Discuss what status should you set in Grafana: CRITICAL, DOWN, or NO LONGER EXISTS?
• How do you convince the CFO to approve a third data center when the first two have already been written off as CAPEX?
• What backup retention period do you recommend when the main issue is the lifespan of the storage hardware itself?
• How do you achieve "five nines" of availability when the only nines in the project are the digits in the recovery cost?

“Let’s mount that disk!”, he said, ramming a 3.5” screw into a 2.5” disk, leaving me screwed 18 months later, wondering how somebody can terminally damage the screw head to a degree that I head to decapitate it to still be able to mount a replacement drive. F#^% you, unsang asshole that couldn’t be bothered to understand M3 screw diameters and didn’t fucking bother to reuse the same fucking screw that came with the server and that I found on the floor well dusted!

Update
And f}%# you, too, Dell, there’s no reason to use M3 scews to mount a 2.5” to 3.5” caddy, stick with f#^\ing standards, we have them for a reason!*

...The one's that you don't want to delete and the ones that you want to delete.

Ok, it's not really mine, but that of another truly shitty sysadmin who used to be on my team, and this is their bash history from an old remote Linux server. Some paths have been changed to protect identities, otherwise it's just as I found it. Good lord.

$ cat /home/shittysysadmin/.bash_history
exit
passwd
sudu su -
2017f150RD$
exit
sudu su -
sudu su 
sudu su -
netdiag
pwd
whoami
exit
sudu su -
exit
clear
pwd
sudu su -
groups
sudo
sudo su
sudu su -
exit
pwd
EXIT
exit
sudo su
exit
ll
exit
sudo su
exit
passwd
exit
sudo su
exit
sudo su
exit
ll
clear
ll
sudo java -jar /usr/local/someapp/bin/DatabaseUtil.jar backup -saveBackupTo /home/shittysysadmin
clear
ll
sudo su
exit
sudo su
exit
sudo su
exit
sudo su
exit
sudo su
exit
sudo su
exit
passwd
exit
sudo su
exit
sudo su
exit
2020Busa1300$
sudo su
exit
sudo su
exit
sudo java -jar /usr/local/someapp/bin/DatabaseUtil.jar backup -saveBackupTo .
sudo
sudo su
exit

I really tried my best. Contacted vendors, got quotes, led the implementation project solo to prove I can do it. It was a big undertaking for me personally as I've never dealt with these things, but I managed it quite well.

Yet today the boss came shouting at me with a face more red than our monitoring dashboard - he had reviewed the bills and was furious.

I tried to calm him down and explained that I did my due diligence and only picked the best offers - I even got a 15% discount for signing a 5-year commitment.

But turns out that maybe I picked the wrong vendor in the end? My boss couldn't believe the bill we got from Maersk and he seemed super unhappy. Also the landlord had called him as we were now in violation of some safety codes - in my defense, according to RACI the transportation contractor was supposed to make sure we follow all rules and regulations! How was I supposed to know the parking lot was not supposed to be used for this?

Anyway, I'm devastated. Boss wants to cancel everything but I already signed the 5 year lease commitment with our CEO's signing platform key. And we've got 30 people scheduled to come next week to empty out the office (ahead of the project schedule even!). What should I do?