Once a year, we honor the person who keeps the mail server running, restores the file you accidentally deleted and makes sure you can watch funny videos of cats. This person is the SysAdmin, the unsung hero of every great company. Ours is George. George makes sure that the right wires are connected to the right routers to the right switches to the right servers, which are connected to the right databases so that you get the best DNS service in the world.

At OpenDNS, we make the SysAdmin’s life easier every day by giving you all those green checkmarks signifying day after day of zero downtime along with the features to help make doing your job easier. SysAdmins are so important, we think it’s lame they only get one day of honor. It’s no secret that most times the SysAdmin only gets recognized when things go wrong. So this year, OpenDNS is celebrating SysAdmin Day throughout the month of July, not just on July 27th.

Every Monday in July we’ll deliver you a challenge, and every Friday we’ll announce the winner on our blog. Only SysAdmins are welcome to participate. Prizes will surely be something you consider a gift. (Hint: It won’t be more DNS uptime. You’re using OpenDNS, so you get that anyway. Hint 2: It includes the words “Gift” and “Certificate.”)

The guys at AdminSpotting sum it up so well, so we thank them for the below poem. There were a few bad words we left out of our version, read theirs for the original, in all its SysAdmin-y glory.

Read and enjoy, SysAdmins. It’s not just your day, it’s your month.

Choose no life. Choose no career. Choose no family. Choose a big computer, choose hard disks the size of washing machines, old cars, CD ROM writers and electrical coffee makers. Choose no sleep, high caffeine and mental insurance. Choose fixed interest car loans. Choose a rented shoebox. Choose no friends. Choose black jeans and matching combat boots. Choose a swivel chair for your office in a range of fabrics. Choose NNTP and wondering why you’re logged on on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting in that chair looking at mind-numbing, spirit-crushing web sites, stuffing junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last on some miserable newsgroup, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, [omitted] up lusers Gates spawned to replace the computer-literate. Choose your future. Choose sysadmining.

It’s starting to look like summer time here at OpenDNS. Rather than hit the beach to catch some waves, we’re hitting the books to help people surf better.

We were pleased to find out that the men and women who run the IT departments for places of learning are using OpenDNS to make their students, staff and faculty’s lives better. Check out the press release we did with the Jackson Public Schools in Mississippi. They are the largest school district in the state with over 36,000 users — and they aren’t the only school using us. Campbell County Public Schools is also using OpenDNS to give their users a better Internet experience — all 10,000 of them.

Most of the schools that use OpenDNS choose to add a custom logo (free!) in their account so that their users see a customized search results page whenever they go to a website that doesn’t exist or search from the address bar. We’ve heard some of our users refer to this as their “own personal search engine.” That’s great to hear and that’s exactly why the feature exists. If you don’t have a logo on your search results page right now, what are you waiting for?

It’s not just schools either. We found out that our neighbors across the bay in Berkeley are using OpenDNS at the Berkeley Public Library. That’s awesome. I know there are schools and libraries that don’t know what OpenDNS is yet so if you are friends with your local head geek feel free to tell him or her about the awesomeness that is OpenDNS.

Finally, are you the IT hero for your network? As you can tell from the links in this post, we’ve put out a few small press releases about some of our more interesting users. If you are using OpenDNS in a cool setting or think there’s something unique about your network feel free to send me an email (or use our contact form at the bottom of every page) and let me know. We just might ask to feature you in a blog post or a press release.

OpenDNS users are great. They’re smart, funny, good-looking and kind. Did I mention they’re really smart?

Especially these four guys, who put an OpenDNS shortcut link on their site.

• Paul Stamatiou of PaulStamatiou.com
• Brian Heys of BrianHeysWrites.com
• Eric Wahlforss of Eric.Wahlforss.com
• Wayne Smallman of BlahBlahTech.com

An OpenDNS shortcut link makes it easy for the hundreds of thousands of OpenDNS users to get back to your site, time and time again. Who doesn’t want that? All you do is put a link on your site that lets people create a shortcut straight to you. From that point forward, they can type something short and easy to remember into their address bar and be taken straight to your site. Simple instructions are here.

If you like being categorized with smart, funny, good-looking, kind people, you should put a shortcut link on your site, too.

There’s no reason anyone should have to deal with flaky DNS. The students at Brown University went without Internet connectivity for 3 hours (!) yesterday because their DNS was less than reliable.

Brown University, if you can hear us: use OpenDNS!

We made some updates to our support system yesterday and as a consequence, our contact email was down for a half-day. We messed up and we’re sorry. If you wrote in during that time, please give us another chance and resend your email. We’ll be snappy in our reply.

Jason Sjobeck
President, The Sjobeck Company; Treo Enthusiast

OpenDNS: Tell us about yourself. What do you do for a living?

JS: I’m the president of The Sjobeck Company. We’re internetworking consultants. We design, install, manage and troubleshoot our clients’ networks and devices nationwide.

OpenDNS: I know mobile devices are integral to your business. Which are your
favorites?

JS: The Treo 650. I have a few guys working for me using them as well as a few Blackberrys. I prefer the Treo over the Blackberry, since whatever it lacks in email, it makes up for in all of its other functionalities and openness. I want to get a new one that does EDGE or EVDO or UTMS (it is effort to keep track of all the carriers’ broadband acronyms) but I just haven’t come across one yet that fits. The perfect solution would be the Treo 650, but with WiFi & UMTS & be a hair smaller/thinner/lighter with another 24 hours battery life. Can you invent me one of those? You would be a kajillionaire if you could.

OpenDNS: I wish I could. So you love your Treo, but prior to OpenDNS, did
DNS service for your Treo cause any problems for you?

JS: Wasted time. Not to mention the annoyance of having to type URLs into
the tiny little address bar. If you made a mistake, it wouldn’t redirect you or give you a nice list of choices of places you probably meant to go. It was a problem of wasted time on typos, multiplied 30 fold over all of our employees and clients.

OpenDNS: Would you recommend OpenDNS to other businesses who rely on
smartphones?

JS: Definitely. The carriers’ name servers don’t do anything special — fast, useful, unique, safe, et cetera — while OpenDNS does all those things. I recommend OpenDNS for all users of all smartphones because I’ve noticed on our few dozen Treos so far fast, safe, reliable URL resolution as well as the time and money saving feature of URL redirection for mistyped URLs.

OpenDNS: Is it time to expect more from your phone?

JS: Absolutely. I know it sounds a little extreme to say, but every second counts. I’m driving, working, eating, have a client on the phone, have a vendor on call-waiting, have to email in an order for a part and I dont want to be buggering-around with my browser looking for sites. Drives me just a tiny bit (more) crazy. Any chance to make the day flow a little smoother is well worth it.

Note to OpenDNS customers: Use OpenDNS on your mobile device! We have some mobile instructions but are always looking for more. If you’ve successfully set up OpenDNS on your mobile, tell us how you did it. Post your instructions here, send us an email or share them in the OpenDNS Forums.

The San Francisco CBS affiliate, KPIX, aired a segment yesterday about OpenDNS and how it makes the Internet faster. We were even the teaser before the commercial! John Roberts and our much-appreciated local customer, Sean Cullen, were interviewed for the piece. Sean is a busy film editor and it’s not easy for him to get away mid-day, which he did for the filming.

The segment was great because it not only explained what a fantastic service OpenDNS is, but also explained what the Domain Name System is – not easy!

Thanks to producer Julia Madden and reporter Jeanette Pavini (who you may remember from the PhishTank segment last year) for helping spread the word.

If you saw the segment, what’d you think?

Since we launched last year, many of you have asked us to provide official graphics (banners, icons, and buttons) to display on your own sites as a way to promote and endorse OpenDNS. We’re lucky to have such enthusiastic fans, but until now, we’ve only offered a small logo.

We can do better than that.

Today we’re offering a new image that’s much more interesting — not only visually, but also because it has two states: one for OpenDNS users, and one for everyone else.

Check out http://www.opendns.com/buttons/ to grab the HTML snippet for your site.

In the coming months, we’ll be adding more graphics to help you spread the word about OpenDNS. Stay tuned!