I know many of us visit places such as schools or work that have network/system administrators, and I also know they tend to be paranoid and easily feel threatened. What is the admin like around you? I know the one I deal with is paranoid, highly trained in Solitaire and eating pizza.

The company I currently work for recently switched IT Directors (about 4-5 months ago). The original Admin I didn't know well (he left just as I was hiring on), but the new one has been easy and laid back, but far from stupid or "unaware". His first order of business was to tighten security by deploying a few OpenBSD boxes in strategic places on our network (firewalls, DNS, etc...). Now he's testing PostgreSQL as a replacement for our MS SQL databases.

He's a contributor to both FreeBSD and OpenBSD, and when I jokingly said I'd like to have another computer so I could run Gentoo on it, he hunted one down and had it to me within a few hours. Very cool guy.

You left off the option for "I'm the system administrator."

System administrators often have rules that are necessary for reasons you may not be aware of. This hardly makes them paranoid. Sure, there are bad admins out there who are lazy, and sometimes do things just to somehow make themselves feel powerful, but you shouldn't assume this without having more information. Network security should be high on the list of important items of a good admin, and sometimes this means doing things that an end user may see as "paranoid" or "stupid," but as I said, in most of those situations the end user doesn't have all of the information, and just doesn't understand that there are real reasons for certain policies and/or restrictions, etc.

Well, see, at the school I used to go to, the admin was open to suggestions, laid back and extremely efficient, but not at the school I go to now, he is a jerk. He does his work by personal interest, and sets up appointments in which I am to meet him and he is never there. I am glad they aren't all like that...

The sysadmin at my old high school was a mix of 3, and 5. The sysadmin at my most recent high school...well, I never see him/her/it/them.

But with the old sysadmin, he would do NOTHING aside from stare at the netlogs scroll by, and see which one of us was pissing around with the network - we were a select group of, about five, and let me tell you, he LOVED us. *cough*

our sysadmin at school was paranoid. we coulen use floppy disks usb pens or any other removable storage, and the PCs werw screwed into the desk! so if one crashed you had to turn off the power to the whole room to reset it.
you had to change your password every 2 weeks and you coudlent use one you had ever used before (they had to be at leas 10 caricters long and had to contain, upper case, lower case and numbers)

we diddnt have email.
you couldnt view PDFs on the web as it thoght you were downloding somthing


to print more than 5 pages you had to get special dispensation in teh form of a signed slip from your teacher with the file name on it (the sysadmion would print ity for you )

if you reallly neeeded to ransfer a file to teh network you could give the disk to the sysadmin who would virus scan it several times with diffenrt clients on a sand alone machine before copying the file over.
so many phrases were banned on websites that the short form of seconds (secs) would block the site and add the domain to the blacklist for evermore.


hen he moaned that he was overworked

At my local library, the sysadmin is an old woman who refuses to believe the cables are wrong, never upgrades, basiclly knows nothing. 5 miles away the lib computers are so you can't log on if your under 18 without a parent. 24 miles away, the sysadmins are the only thing stopping one of my friends from switching to Linux! Uuugh...

Well...

I am the Sys Admin where I work. Hmm, I see some folks in our office have voted incorrectly.

Now, where is my ether-killer...

My college just hired a new Network/Sys Admin last semester, one of my friends

He's a really cool guy that knows his stuff.

I voted for "slow but works well" because I am the systems administrator for my work. I get the job done, but I know I could be more efficient and productive. Most of the time I am surfing the web or taking an afternoon walk.

I am my system administrator, so naturally I voted "lazy and unproductive".

Since I've had no cause to speak to him in the last two years, save to report that a PC's not booting, i'll go with 'Reliable and efficient'.

I'm one of several other sysadmins. I'm sort of considered senior to the rest since most of them started here fresh out of college and I'm only 28, most of them are 25 or younger. Most of them I'd consider novice sysadmins, they've never worked anywhere else and got lucky as the company I work for hired fresh college grads, but then realized they needed some experience.

The only problem is they still don't know their shit and since they've "technically" been here longer than me, they have seniority and don't listen most of the time, so I just sit back and let them learn their lesson.

Let me tell you the frustrations at times trying to tell my supervisor (only because he's been here for 3 years and is the worst manager in the world by all standards) who's only 25 how it should be done, when I only view him as a young immature frat boy.. I feel older everyday..

I'm sufficient, fast and respond when necessary.. there is one other guy here that is a little bit older than me who is the same. The rest are slow, can't manage time and goof off way too much and lack a lot of experience. They learned from the previous frat boys that started here before them and scared when I mention something they're unfamiliar with cause they don't understand it or not willing to learn. Hopefully one day they'll all grow up, but I'll be long gone by then..

I didn't understand the question. Can we schedule a two hour meeting to discuss it? Preferably in the morning so I can skip breakfast and scarf down some free bagels.

owch!!! that woudl kill just about anything ethernet related