Our celebration of SysAdmin Appreciation Day continues. Only one week left until the big day, Friday, July 27th. I hope you’ve been planning your gifts for that special admin in your life.

Today, I’m happy to share the winner of SysAdmin Challenge No. 3, which was to share the best SysAdmin joke with us. The winner of this week’s $50 gift card from American Express is Steven A.

Here’s the winning entry.

Q. Where does a sysadmin go after work?
A. 127.0.0.1

Brief, witty, with a tip of the hat to network addressing… how could we not enjoy it?

Come back Monday, July 23rd to learn about the final weekly challenge.

(My thanks to Fabio Calvigioni (oRi0n) for translating this post into Italian, below.)

Update: Several commenters say the problem is gone, and that appears to be true. We hope it will continue. - July 23, 2007

We care about delivering a great Internet experience worldwide, and it appears that many Italians are poorly served by their current DNS infrastructure.

Several times over the last several months, Telecom Italia has blocked DNS requests from OpenDNS servers. What happens? Our customers in Italy are unable to resolve domains that uses Telecom Italia for their authoritative DNS, for example: pf.rossoalice.virgilio.it (a large Italian ISP).

For months, we’ve jumped through technical hoops to work around these blocks, even though all we’re doing is what any recursive DNS service would do: ask for the location of a domain from the respective authoritative server.

We’ve communicated through several channels: email, IRC, telephone. (We don’t speak Italian, but we’ve made an effort through translation services.)

Result? Nothing. (In DNS land, we’d call it a SERVFAIL.)

If anyone responsible and responsive at Telecom Italia wants to help us resolve this matter, we’re more than willing to work this out directly.

For all those Italian customers who have been affected now and again, we apologize. We are still trying to resolve this problem via normal channels. But we’ve been quite patient so far, and we’re a bit tired of banging our heads against this particular wall.

Here’s why we’re naming Telecom Italia.

First, dnsti.interbusiness.it and dnsts.interbusiness.it have blocked our requests.
Second, the interbusiness.it domain is owned by Telecom Italia, according to whois data.

Domain:             interbusiness.it
Status:             ACTIVE
Created:            1996-01-29 00:00:00
Last Update:        2007-01-30 00:36:13
Expire Date:        2008-01-29

Registrant
  Name:             Telecom Italia S.p.A.
  ContactID:        TELE616-ITNIC
  Address:          Via Paolo Di Dono, 44
                       Roma
                       00143
                       RM
                       IT
  Created:          2007-03-01 10:44:12
  Last Update:      2007-03-01 10:44:12

Nameservers
  dnsti.interbusiness.it
  dns.opb.interbusiness.it
  dns3.nic.it
  dnsts.interbusiness.it

I look forward to sharing a solution.

Telecom Italia non risponde ad OpenDNS

OpenDNS si impegna per fornire in tutto il mondo il miglior servizio agli utenti di Internet, ma sembra che molti italiani debbano fare i conti con un’infrastruttura DNS molto carente.

Per diverse volte negli ultimi mesi Telecom Italia ha bloccato richieste DNS dai server OpenDNS. Cosa succede quindi? Molti nostri clienti in Italia non riescono a risolvere nomi di domini che usano Telecom Italia come server DNS autoritativi. Per esempio, pf.rossoalice.virgilio.it (un importante ISP italiano) viene risolto in maniera errata.

Per mesi abbiamo utilizzato espedienti tecnici per aggirare questi blocchi, anche se tutto quello che stiamo facendo è quello che farebbe ogni servizio di DNS ricorsivo: richiedere l’indirizzo di un dominio al suo rispettivo server autoritativo.

Abbiamo provato a contattare Telecom Italia per email, IRC e telefono (non parliamo italiano ma abbiamo fatto dei tentativi utilizzando dei servizi di traduzione).

Risultato: nessuna risposta (nel campo dei DNS lo chiamiamo SERVFAIL).

Se qualche responsabile o addetto di Telecom Italia è interessato ad aiutarci a risolvere questo problema saremmo dispostissimi a collaborare direttamente in tale senso.

Chiediamo scusa a tutti i clienti italiani che hanno riscontrato e stanno ancora riscontrando questo problema. Stiamo ancora provando ad eliminare il blocco attraverso i normali canali. Fin qui siamo stati abbastanza pazienti ma ora siamo un po’ stanchi di doverci scervellare con questo problema.

Ecco perché crediamo che Telecom Italia sia la causa del problema.

Innanzitutto, dnsti.interbusiness.it e dnsts.interbusiness.it hanno bloccato le nostre richieste. Inoltre, il dominio interbusiness.it, secondo i dati del whois, appartiene a Telecom Italia.

Domain:             interbusiness.it
Status:             ACTIVE
Created:            1996-01-29 00:00:00
Last Update:        2007-01-30 00:36:13
Expire Date:        2008-01-29

Registrant
  Name:             Telecom Italia S.p.A.
  ContactID:        TELE616-ITNIC
  Address:          Via Paolo Di Dono, 44
                       Roma
                       00143
                       RM
                       IT
  Created:          2007-03-01 10:44:12
  Last Update:      2007-03-01 10:44:12

Nameservers
  dnsti.interbusiness.it
  dns.opb.interbusiness.it
  dns3.nic.it
  dnsts.interbusiness.it

Spero di aggiornarvi presto con una soluzione.

Last week you proved you’re creative and clever. This week we want to see your funny side.

Every profession has its standard-issue jokes. Among the more well-known are the one about the lawyer and the ambulance:

Q. What do you call a lawyer who doesn’t chase ambulances?
A. Retired

And the one about the slacker musician:

Q. What do you call a musician who breaks up with his girlfriend?
A. Homeless

We know great sysadmin jokes exist, so shoot us an email at sysadminday at opendns dot com and share the funniest ones you know. Like the previous challenges, the winner gets a $50 gift card from American Express. You have until this Friday at 9 a.m. PST to submit an entry.

I thought about summing up this post with a haiku of my own, but this week’s winner is too good to compete with. Huge congratulations to Kirk Friggstad, the winner of OpenDNS SysAdmin Challenge No. 2.

We asked all of you, Kirk included, to compose a haiku about what it means to be a sysadmin. The response was overwhelming and on behalf of the whole team, thanks to everyone who took the time to submit. You guys kept us laughing all week long.

Kirk submitted a series of haikus, each one seemingly funnier and more clever than the previous. Here’s the one we selected for the crown:

“Evening Reflection”
—————
Moon shines on water
Crickets chirp in the tall grass
Damn, it’s my pager

Stay tuned right here for details about the next in the series of four SysAdmin Challenges, to be announced on Monday. And for your reading pleasure, here are a few more of Kirk’s submissions, at least a couple being solid runner-ups.

“Server Room”
————–
Summer clouds float by
No, it’s smoke from the Dell rack
Watch out for halon

“With No Power Comes Great Responsibility”
—————
A quiet peace comes
Beeps and fans fall silent now
Power supply fails

“On the Help Desk”
—————
The one true answer:
“Try turning it off and on”
Words of great wisdom

“The Last Day”
—————
Where is that backup?
I swear it worked yesterday!
Work on resume.

There are 17 days left until SysAdmin Appreciation Day, which means it time to unveil challenge No. 2.

This week we ask you to go deep inside yourself and find your inner poet. Write a haiku on a topic that is intimately familiar to you: What it means to be a sysadmin. Compose the poem - the funnier the better - and send it to our judges at sysadminday at opendns dot com.

For those of you less poetically inclined, the only guideline we’ll give you is that haikus are generally three lines in length. That’s not to say yours needs to be, but it should give you a starting point.

Here are a few examples from Librenix:

“Email Dilemma”

Mail is killer app
spam overflows my quota
I need new mailbox

“The Script Kiddie”

My server was hacked
SSH had a hole
now my box is 0wned

The rules are the same as last week…

First place gets a $50 American Express gift card.
You have until Friday at 9 a.m. PST to submit an entry.

Good luck sysadmins, and remember: You have to send in your entry via email to the address listed above.