System administrators can sometimes seem like they are trying to get everyone down. Someone goes to them with a great idea, application, feature, or just something they just want to get done. When the sysadmin comes in, instead of being enthusiastic about the great idea, he starts talking about viruses, hacking, earthquakes, floods, fires, Vogon invasions, and all the things that can go wrong. Because of this, the natural reaction is to stick the sysadmin in the basement and stop inviting them to parties.

In order to work past this issue, it takes a little work from both sides of the table. Coworkers need to remember that disaster is part of a sysadmin’s job and that Murphy’s law is part of what they do. Part of a sysadmin’s job to think about this stuff all the time because we are expected to have backups and to be able to recover from small events to major disasters. Major disasters are uncommon but do happen, hence the importance of offsite backups at a minimum. Small disasters, such as power failures, router failures are actually quite common. When a sysadmin is doing a really good job, people don’t even know about some of the smaller failures.

It also falls on the sysadmin’s shoulders not get stuck in this gloom and doom world. We have remind ourselves not to get in the habit of saying No to everything because something could go wrong. This is important because the danger is that that people will try to start bypassing you or just not believing you when you talk about very real threats because they think you are crying wolf. It largely comes down to being mindful of the bad things that can happen while being enthusiastic about all the good things that can come from a new idea or feature.

It can be tough not be the guy in the street with the end of the world sign when in a way it is part of your job, but learning how to find the balance is one of the challenges of being a sysadmin.

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  • Or stop getting invited to budget planning meetings since we keep costing people money for things that’ll never happen. That’s another risk-factor here.

  • System administrators need to learn to leave the risk analysis for their disaster recovery policies. That’s the purpose for which the document is written. Yet, it is still important to warn people of the risks involved with anything they suggest so they can decide whether it’s worth the risk or not. I think people would rather endure a bit of doom and gloom from the system administrator than to actually experience it!

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                        Thirty-six predictions for the world: