What do system administrators do all day?

This article is originally posted on SimplerCloud's blog here.


Today (25 July 2014) is System Administrator Appreciation Day, which is an event to show appreciation for the work of system administrators (or sysadmins) and other IT workers. It is celebrated on the last Friday of July every year, since the year 2000.

As a hardened, 15-year veteran system and network administrator, I know first hand about the many tasks a system administrator needs to do, the skill sets and knowledge he needs to learn, and with the daunting tasks and long hours he has to keep. Yet sometimes, normal users would not know their system administrators as well as the system administrators know their users. And that is why System Administrator Day is an awesome day that everyone should celebrate.

Treat your system administrator today, because 25 July is World System Administrator Appreciation Day

What do system administrators do, and why do we need to appreciate their work? According to Wikipedia‘s definition, a system administrator is a person who is responsible for the upkeep, configuration, and reliable operation of computer systems; especially multi-user computers, such as servers.

In layman’s terms, system administrators manage all the servers, network equipment and any other IT infrastructure for an organisation. In many companies, those system administrators are part of the organisation’s IT team or department. They are the one who setup the network within the organisation, installing mail servers, file servers and many other servers required by the organisation, installing all the required applications to support the organisation’s business, applying operating system updates, patches and configuration changes, among others. They are responsible to ensure that all the services are running.

For example, system administrators are responsible to ensure that Internet connection in the office is working, the mail server is running and processing emails tht are sent and received by all staff within the organisation. Without these basic operations, you will not be able to do anything which requires Internet connection, such as surfing the web or checking your emails. And even if your Internet connection is working, you won’t be able to send/receive emails if your organisation’s mail server is down.

Sysadmins make managers look good, but managers often misunderstand them (Source: Dilbert.com)

There are different types of system administrators based on their roles and responsibilities. A bigger company might have different system administrators having different roles, but for smaller company, most of the different roles might be shared by just a few system administrators, or even one single person. Some of the different types of system administrators are:

• Server administrator – maintains the operating system of the servers, and to some extent, the applications as well, such as the mail services, the web services, etc. He is also in-charge of troubleshooting any hardware, operating system or application related problems.
• Network administrator – maintains the network infrastructure, such as the routers and switches, and troubleshoot network-related problems.
• Database administrator (DBA) – maintains the database system used by organisation. In bigger organisation which uses bigger and more complex databases, there is a DBA which specifically responsible for this role. In smaller organisation, this role would normally be shared by the server administrator.

Unlike many other professions like pilots, medical doctors, etc, there is no single path of training to become a system administrator. While most system administrators have a degree in computer science, information technology or any other similar fields, anyone can actually become a system administrator by self learning and, in most cases, on-the-job training. There are some training and certifications intended to specific IT fields such as Microsoft training and certification for Microsoft-based systems and applications such as Microsoft Windows and SQL, Cisco training and certification for Cisco network, etc.

Most system administrators are always on-call, since they have system and network infrastructure which needs to run 24×7. That said, a system administrator can get paged or called at 3am in the morning when a mail server goes down, or when the Internet connection suddenly stops working. But the most important thing is that they are the one who ensure that all servers are functioning, the network is running and healthy, all the time.

That’s why good system administrators are often overworked and very much in demand, and, nowadays, crucial to the success of Internet app, web application and cloud-based companies.

“It’s not magic, it’s talent and sweat.”

That’s why, way back in the year 2000, a system administrator named Ted Kekatos suggested a yearly day event when everyone can appreciate the work of system administrators by – for example – giving them cake and ice cream and throwing a small party or celebration. This has become an annual event, celebrated every year on the last Friday of July. Today marks the 14th year we are celebrating System Administrator Appreciation Day.

Good system administrators never stop learning, and combine multiple skillsets to perform many different and unending tasks.   I wish all system administrators everywhere a very happy System Administrator’s Day.

Getting A New Phone For Free

As I have mentioned on my tweet earlier, I have got myself a new phone. And you know what, I got my phone upgraded for free. Really. :)

Since I’m a SingTel’s mio Home user, I am eligible for re-contract every one year. And this month is exactly one year since I re-contracted my line for me to get my Samsung Galaxy S II phone last year. I checked SingTelShop’s website and with my current 3G Flexi Value plan, I can get the new Samsung Galaxy S III phone for $348. Furthermore, with SingTel UOB credit card promotion, I can get $50 off the handset price, so the price of the phone reduces to just $298, or approximately 2.2 million rupiah.

Lastly, I traded-in my old Samsung Galaxy S II phone and fortunately, SingTel’s trade-in value for my old phone is quite high, $300. Therefore, I don’t need to pay a single cent for this upgrade. :)

There are two colours available for Samsung Galaxy S III, and I chose the pebble blue. I’ve checked some stores which sell the phone without contract, and for some reason, the blue Galaxy S III is more expensive than the white one. Not too sure why. I suspect that many people prefers the blue one rather than the white one, causing the demand for the blue one is higher, thus pushing the price slightly higher.

Apologise for the low quality of the picture above, I took it using my Blackberry Bold 9900 phone, which you might have known, its camera is not really that good. Of course, I cannot take a picture of the phone using the phone itself, can I? :)

My verdict after using this new phone for a couple of days: I feel that its CPU processes faster than my older Galaxy S II. Applications such as Seesmic, Facebook and Instagram runs faster on the phone, thanks to its quad-core 1.4 GHz CPU, which is much better than S II’s dual-core 1.2 GHz CPU. I also appreciate its bigger display, it’s a 4.8-inch display compared to S II’s 4.3-inch. Furthermore, the resolution is much better, 720 x 1280 pixels compared to S II’s 480 x 800 pixels.

Compared to my older S II, I think that the S III has a slightly longer battery life. But it could also be because it’s new, so I cannot compare apple-to-apple with my 1-year old S II. Some people have pointed out that the S III might have a software bug draining its battery, but so far I don’t see it happening on my phone.

I also love the bahasa Indonesia dictionary. I can type faster using its swype function with ease in Indonesian. Its notification functions are also much better. And having this new phone allows me to have 50 GB of space in my Dropbox account. There are also many new features which I didn’t have it on the earlier Samsung Galaxy S II.

Basically, upgrading my phone from my older S II to the new S III is a good choice. Especially since I can have it for free. :)

Koprol Team Disbanded By Yahoo!, Will Koprol Follow Kronologger’s Fate?

Just after I read Aulia Masna’s article on Daily Social about the plan to relaunch Yahoo! Koprol in May, I was surprised to see Satya Witoelar’s tweet stating that he would post the CVs of “talented experienced ex-Yahoo_ID/Koprol ‘s developers” soon. The list was eventually posted on Satya’s blog, confirming that the whole Koprol’s developers team has been disbanded by Yahoo.

From what I understand, Yahoo! is a sinking ship, and as part of the new CEO Scott Thompson’s strategy to keep the ship afloat, Yahoo! is axing about 2,000 of its staff globally. Yahoo! Indonesia is no exception, and unfortunately Koprol’s development team has been included on the list. It beats me though, on why the whole team had to be disbanded ahead of its planned launch of the supposedly new Koprol 2.0 engine in May.

The big question now is what will be Koprol’s fate. Will the social media platform be closed? As Aulia of Daily Social has pointed out, Koprol has a strong users base in Indonesia, and when the news of possible imminent shutdown has spread out, many of its users voiced out (with special hashtag: #saveKoprol) that the platform should not be closed.

I have to admit that I have not been using Koprol for quite some time. As a location-based social media platform, it is losing out to Foursquare especially for my case here in Singapore. However, Koprol is purely made in Indonesia and by Indonesians, therefore as fellow Indonesians, we should be proud of Koprol.

I met some friends, such as Ryan, Nunil and Ari, through Koprol. I met Leo and Smitty, in person, through a Koprol gathering here in Singapore. KCR, Koprol’s community radio, inspired me to setup Radio Komunitas Twitter Indonesia (RKTI). Therefore, like it or not, I have some fond memories in Koprol.



Let’s ask Yahoo! not to close down Koprol. If Yahoo! doesn’t want to run Koprol anymore, then may be Koprol founders can request to take over back Koprol and keep on running the social media platform outside Yahoo? I’m not too sure on whether it’s possible, since I understand that Yahoo! has spent quite a lot of money to acquire Koprol way back in May 2010.

Please, do not let Koprol follow the fate of Kronologger, another Indonesian-made microblogging platform in the past, which was closed down after being acquired by now-defunct Asia Blogging Network. 

PS. Images courtesy of @candoddi and @chocoz

Xperia X1’s Sliding Keyboard: Design Flaw

Photo: My Sony Ericsson Xperia X1

After almost a year using my Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 mobile phone, I have come to a conclusion that its sliding keyboard is a design flaw. If you really a heavy user of the keyboard, I would not recommend the phone at all. On the other hand, people normally choose Xperia X1 because of the keyboard, otherwise they would opt for other cheaper phones such as HTC Diamond or Samsung Omnia. Therefore, it’s not worth spending your money for that expensive phone. For Xperia X1 wanna-be user, I would suggest you buy another phone instead.

Lousy Phone

I bought the phone on November last year, and after becoming a happy user of the phone for just several weeks, I have started to experience the problem on its sliding keyboard some time on late February or early March 2009, which was just several months after it was bought. I will not go into details on the problem, you can just click the above-mentioned hyperlinks for more info about the problem. In short, the problem was fixed after I sent the phone for repair some time on July 2009. Basically, they changed the keyboard with a new one to fix the problem, although since they confirmed that it was a hardware issue, I had concerns that the new keyboard would eventually have the same problem when the time comes.

And… guess what? My concerns came true. Since last month, again I started to experience similar problem with the keyboard. And yes, it *is* the new keyboard which is having the same problem. And I am not alone, many other Xperia X1 users experience the same problem after several weeks or months using the phone. With even new keyboard experiencing the same problem, I conclude that the problem is due to a design flaw which will cause the keyboard to have the problem after several weeks or month of usage, depends on how often the user uses the sliding keyboard.

Lousy Service

I brought the phone to the Sony Ericsson Service Centre at Wisma Atria again last Sunday (1/11). Since the warranty period is nearing the end, the customer service officer said that the service will be chargeable, even though I brought the warranty card, because I was unable to provide her with the receipt as proof of purchase. She said that she was not able to determine the exact date of purchase because it was not on Sony Ericsson’s database.

She advised that I can try calling SingTel Mobile’s customer service and get them to fax the copy of my mobile contract to Sony Ericsson. When I called them, they said that they can provide the service, however it would take 5-7 working days and it costs me $30. The SingTel’s service officer advised that I might be able to get the copy of the mobile contract from the shop I purchased the Xperia X1 from. Sigh, I ditched the idea and decided to search for the contract on my pile of files at home on Sunday night. Alhamdulillah, thank God, I found it after almost two hours combing my files, and I have faxed it over to Sony Ericsson earlier this morning to ensure that I don’t get charged for this service.

No More Sony Ericsson Phones For Me

With such an experience with a lousy phone with a lousy service from the service centre, I have promised myself that I will never buy another Sony Ericsson phone. Well, some might said that since Xperia X1 was built by HTC for Sony Ericsson, that means the design flaw might be HTC’s fault, but I have friends who have HTC Touch Pro and the newer HTC Touch Pro 2, and they are happy users of the phones. My friend Arga suggested me to upgrade to the upcoming Xperia X2 phone which will be released this month, or even the future Android-based Xperia X3, but how can I ensure that similar design flaw will not apply to the newer phones as well?

 
Photo: HTC Touch Pro 2 (courtesy of gsmarena.com)

  
Photo: Samsung B7610 OmniaPRO (courtesy of gsmarena.com)

 
Photo: Sony Ericsson Xperia X2 (courtesy of gsmarena.com)

Photo: Nokia N97 (courtesy of gsmarena.com)

Yes, I intend to replace my Xperia X1 soon, if the problem still happens again after this second round of servicing. But I’m still not too sure which phone I should buy. It has to has a sliding keyboard, and it cannot be another Sony Ericsson phone. :P So, Xperia X2 is definitely out of question. I was considering Nokia N97 before my friends advised me that it’s not really a good phone, since it hangs quite frequently. I am currently considering either HTC Touch Pro 2 or the new Samsung B7610 OmniaPRO (the sliding keyboard type-one, not the Blackberry-alike OmniaPRO B7320). Do you have any other phones I should consider? :)

Kudos to An-Nahdhah Mosque's Management

I was attending a friend's wedding event at An-Nahdhah Mosque, Bishan on Sunday, 11 October 2009 and when I went back, I inadvertently and carelessly left my bag, containing my HP Mini netbook, at the basement carpark, before I went into my car. It seems that I might have left the bag when I needed to put on my shoes, and I only realised it after I reached my home at Bukit Batok.

I immediately called the mosque's management after getting the number from SingTel's directory service (100). While driving back from Bukit Batok to Bishan (which seemed like forever), I had Mr. Jamal on the other line, who patiently listened to my panic voice explaining that I had left my bag in the basement carpark. I even wrongly informed him that it was a blue bag, while it is actually a purple backpack. Mr. Jamal said he would check and advised me to call him back in 15 minutes.

Fifteen minutes later, I was already exiting PIE onto Lornie Road when I tried to call the mosque again, and was nervous when nobody picked up the call. I kept on calling using my handsfree but unable to reach anyone in the mosque, until I reached the mosque itself and went into the basement carpark. I was even more nervous when I couldn't find the bag at the place where I might have left it, and immediately took the lift upstairs to the first floor to go to the management office.

I met the mosque's staff at the office (I'm not too sure whether he's Mr. Jamal or another staff) and, alhamdulillah, thank God, the bag was there and he gave it to me. He mentioned that upon receiving my call, he immediately went to the basement carpark and found the bag near the carpark's lobby entrance. There were some other people around when he found the bag so he asked them whether the bag belongs to them, and they said no, so he brought the bag to the management office and kept it there. Thank God!

I also met some of my friends from the wedding event there, and shared my experience with them. Because of that, I didn't manage to thank the mosque staff properly. Thank you, Mr. Jamal and An-Nahdhah mosque's staff, for helping me to locate and keep the bag for me.

1000 Twitter Updates

I just posted my 1000th update on Twitter. Most of them are not really my direct updates, though, since they are cross-posted from Kronologger.

Nothing much special to call for a celebration. It just a reaffirmation that I’m now more into micro-blogging than the actual blogging itself.

Pretty sad, indeed…

Canonian vs Nikonian

Picture courtesy of Andri Setiawan.

This picture shows four photographers (the guy on the far right side is not counted), one of them is an amateur (that's me!) and the other three are professional photographers, all using Canon digital cameras. The photo is taken by another photographer, who was using a Nikon digital camera.

Since I consider myself as an amateur photographer, I am satisfied of using a pocket camera to serve my photography needs. Yes, I wanted to have a so-called "more professional camera" like the Canon EOS which that guy with the white T-shirt is using, especially after I tried to use his camera the other day. But hearing that the camera body itself (without the lens) would already cost almost $2k, I backed off. :) :)

Well, if Pangeran Panda is dreaming of someone giving him a $99k lens for his birthday (which is still months away), can I also dream of someone giving me a $2k Canon EOS camera for my birthday (which is even further months away)? That is only a fraction of Panda's $99k wishlist. :P :P

Hmmm... *dreaming...*

...

...

...

OK, back to reality. :P  Which one is actually better? Canon or Nikon? :)

More Cars on Singapore Roads

Picture taken from Traffic Camera section of One Motoring website.

Those who drive or often take taxis in Singapore will notice that nowadays, there are more cars on Singapore roads compared to two or three years ago. Last year, I would only take less than 15 minutes to reach my home in around Upper Bukit Timah area, from my office in around Science Park area, during evening peak hours. Now, every evening I would need at least 30 minutes, due to congestion along the Ayer Rajah Expressway (AYE). Last time, the expressway was usually congested only if there's an accident, but nowadays, built-up traffic during evening peak time period is now an every day matter.

And now, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) will install more Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) gantries all over Singapore, to control the traffic flow. I don't understand why they chose to do this instead of limiting the number of cars on the roads. They can actually do so by reducing the number of quota available for Certification of Entitlement (COE) bidding. Past two years were actually a good time for LTA to review and reduce the quota since there were many cars being scrapped/de-registered. But instead, they chose to use that reason as an excuse to increase the quota, and as a result, COE plunged to a very low rate in the past couple of years. At the end, more people are buying cars, resulting in more crowded Singapore roads.

They should actually reduce the quota much earlier, say one or two years ago, to control the number of cars, instead of installing more ERP gantries now to control the traffic flow. It's not fair to the road users, especially to those who purchased their cars when the COE was on a much higher level (2004 and earlier). They paid higher COE premium at that time, expecting that they will enjoy smooth flow of traffic due to the limited number of cars on the roads. However, they ended up having to share more crowded roads with newer car owners who paid lesser COE premiums, and now they will also have to share the burden to pay for additional ERP charges.

OK, I admit that my opinion might be subjective since I bought my car in 2003, while the COE rate was above $30k. But don't you agree with me that the government should limit the number of cars in the first place, rather than letting people to buy more cars and perform "damage control" by charging them to use the roads?

Missed That Round of Open Submission

Aaaargh. I missed this year's round of Merdeka's open submission. I intended to register this blog as well as my Minda Indra blog for the open submission, but then I was very busy on that particular day both in the office and at home so I forgot to make the submission. More over, I forgot to mark this date on my scheduler. Guess I will have to wait for the next round of open submission, don't know when...

Why this round of submission is only opened for one day? :(