#five nines

As many may have noticed: teleworking has seen a bit of a bump in popularity as of late. Now seems like a good time to remind everyone ahead of time, that July 31st, is SysAdmin Appreciation Day.

Being SysAdmin is often a thankless job. They're also often underpaid for what they do; with their departments frequently, and drastically, underfunded. However, they're often the most important people within any organization. Managing a vast and complex web of heterogeneous infrastructure; with more and more demanded of them every single day (with even fewer and fewer funds to pay for it all).

During the COVID pandemic, SysAdmin across the world have been busy at the helm trying to keep the dumpster fire that is our collective I.T. infrastructure from completely melting down. All behind the scenes, without fanfare.

SysAdmin keep our machines humming along. They keep us productive, and in Production. They keep us safe (at the cost of their sanity). They keep us connected to coworkers... and connected with our loved ones during these most difficult of times.

They do not seek fame. They do not seek glory. Most importantly: They do not tell your Manager or H.R. that you're buying antique cat collectables from eBay on company time... They're too busy working miracles every day to be so boisterous.

SysAdmin are proof, that not all heroes wear capes.

Restaurant Roll Call: Every Opening and Closing in February 2022

While the new year started out with the sad closings of some beloved institutions, February was all about openings — 23 of them — as well as the long-awaited return of a much-missed favorite. Although sister restaurant Vine Street remains closed in Denver, you can once again grab a seat at the Mountain Sun in Boulder and enjoy the brewpub’s Date Night burger, hot wings and cold beers. While the…

On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, our regular Friday tale in which we ease you into the weekend with readers' tales of the ridiculous things they've been asked to do on evenings, weekends and the other odd times techie folk are asked to go out and fix things up.

This week's contribution comes from reader “JF”, who tells us that “About eight years back, I was co-ordinating a data center build-out.”

The existing facility sported a trio of 220KvA UPSes, but at the new bit barn it was decided to run with just two.

“The decision was made to save costs by relocating one of them to the new building rather than buying all new equipment.”

JF says he “begged the business to call a complete shutdown to remove the UPS. They asked me what the odds of something going wrong, and I made the error of trying to provide an accurate estimate of the risk by sayin there was about a one in 100 chance of problems.”

JF thought a one per cent risk of power failure across 25,000 square feet packed full of server racks, live, in production, would scare off the bean counters.