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.

In the world of publicity, a profile in a publication like the New York Times is the holy grail. Everyone aspires to have one, but few actually realize their goal.

Today the New York Times published a lengthy profile on our CEO, David Ulevitch, and we see this as further proof that OpenDNS is not only a fantastic idea, but the future of how people control their network and navigate the Internet. It’s a good day for OpenDNS.

The profile, written by iconic journalist and book author John Markoff, is spot on: It tracks David’s beginnings at MP3.com. It follows him to Washington University, where he earned an anthropology degree and used his newfound knowledge to approach the Domain Name System from a different perspective. It highlights his first DNS company, EveryDNS, and the beginnings of OpenDNS.

Most importantly, however, it captures David’s aim so well – to make a service people want to use, that doesn’t do anything invasive and makes the overall Internet experience better for everyone.

Be sure to check out the article, and please let us know what you think. Huge thanks to Alicia Abramson at Berkeley, CA, Public Library (an OpenDNS customer) for letting the NYT photographer shoot David on site.

Congrats David.

We asked you to tell us about the time your boss demonstrated an absolute lack of understanding of the SysAdmin profession. Submissions are in, votes have been tallied and the decision is unanimous. I trust you’ll agree the submission that takes SysAdmin Appreciation Day challenge No. 1 is worthy.

Read and laugh, ’cause you know you can relate.

So, it’s our Y2K preparations, and we’re having a project review meeting to go over our timeline and completions.
(more…)

Last week, Virgin Media, a very large United Kingdom ISP, fixed a configuration which was preventing some of their customers from choosing OpenDNS.

The history: last summer, we heard from various NTL customers (Virgin Media was previously known as NTL) that OpenDNS was not an option for them to use, for unknown reasons.

My thanks to Adam Ford in the Operations team at Virgin Media for reaching out with the note below, which he kindly gave me permission to post here. Our thanks, too, to those Virgin Media customers who raised the issue.

I’m impressed by the proactive steps taken by Adam and his colleagues. Giving your customers choice is good business.

The note from Virgin Media

I work in the Operations team at Virgin Media, and we’ve been made aware of an issue regarding some of our customers using DNS services off our network — and directed to your blog. This most certainly shouldn’t be the case, so we looked and corrected a configuration issue on a core router in Cambridge.

Whilst we do currently have in place DNS caching techniques in order to speed up response times for customers, this should ONLY affect traffic to our own DNS servers. (This ‘DNS caching’ method is currently being replaced.)

The configuration error meant some (not all) customers in the Cambridge area would have been forced to use our own DNS servers (transparently redirected).

One of our customers has kindly tested this for us since we made the configuration change and confirmed it is now working as expected.

Hopefully this ends the story: we always permit use of external DNS servers on our Cable/DSL services. I’d be grateful if you could update your blog to ensure customers know the up to date information (ie, it should work fine ) ).

On behalf of Virgin Media I really do apologise for the disruption this has caused, as it should not have happened. This type of error should be near impossible in the future as mentioned above– the current system is being replaced.

Many thanks,

Adam Ford
Principal Internet Systems Engineer
Virgin Media Engineering & Operations

With less than 24 hours left in the first of four SysAdmin Day challenges, I strongly encourage you to send in your submission.

Tell us about the time your boss asked you to do something ridiculous – something that demonstrated he/she has zero understanding of your job.

We want to hear it! Best submission gets a prize. (Hint: it’s a gift certificate.) You get bonus points for making us laugh out loud.

Send an email to sysadminday at opendns dot com.

Good luck SysAdmins!!

Office Space is a funny movie cause it’s kinda true.

We’re all a little bit like Peter Gibbons, asked to come in on a Saturday and reprimanded for not following some stupid office protocol. We all feel a sense of liberation when Peter, after candidly telling the Bobs about his lack of productivity, announces to his love interest he simply “is not going to go” to his job at Initech anymore.

Hopefully your Lumbergh is not as bad as the one in the movie. Hopefully your boss has an idea how much work goes into keeping a network running, and recognizes you for your efforts. Unfortunately, that’s not likely.

We challenge you SysAdmins — tell us your personal Lumbergh story. Send an e-mail sysadminday at opendns dot com. Best story wins.