July means many things to many people, but here at OpenDNS it means just one thing — System Administrator Appreciation Month!

This year we’re throwing a big bash to show our appreciation for you. If you live in the San Francisco area — or want to come to San Francisco for the event — join us at DNA Lounge on Wednesday, July 29. There’ll be good people, good music and good drinks. We even have some surprises for you up our sleeves.

Register for the party here. Admission is free. We hope to see you there!

In parting, thanks to SysAdminDay.com for these words. If they strike home, we really hope to see you in San Francisco:

A sysadmin unpacked the server for this website from its box, installed an operating system, patched it for security, made sure the power and air conditioning was working in the server room, monitored it for stability, set up the software, and kept backups in case anything went wrong. All to serve this webpage.

A sysadmin installed the routers, laid the cables, configured the networks, set up the firewalls, and watched and guided the traffic for each hop of the network that runs over copper, fiber optic glass, and even the air itself to bring the Internet to your computer. All to make sure the webpage found its way from the server to your computer.

A sysadmin makes sure your network connection is safe, secure, open, and working. A sysadmin makes sure your computer is working in a healthy way on a healthy network. A sysadmin takes backups to guard against disaster both human and otherwise, holds the gates against security threats and crackers, and keeps the printers going no matter how many copies of the tax code someone from Accounting prints out.

A sysadmin worries about spam, viruses, spyware, but also power outages, fires and floods.

When the email server goes down at 2 AM on a Sunday, your sysadmin is paged, wakes up, and goes to work.

A sysadmin is a professional, who plans, worries, hacks, fixes, pushes, advocates, protects and creates good computer networks, to get you your data, to help you do work — to bring the potential of computing ever closer to reality.

So if you can read this, thank your sysadmin — and know he or she is only one of dozens or possibly hundreds whose work brings you the email from your aunt on the West Coast, the instant message from your son at college, the free phone call from the friend in Australia, and this [blog].

One Web Day is a day in which people around the world make an effort to celebrate the internet, its use in every day life, and raise awareness of its value. The OpenDNS crew spent One Web Day 2008 by volunteering our time in helping Meraki and the city of San Francisco install free wireless internet here in the city. Meraki is leading the way in creating free city-wide wireless internet access in San Francisco, allowing anyone in range of their wireless network known as “Free the Net” to surf the web. Not only do they pride themselves on providing the city with free internet, they are also giving back to the low-income community by providing those people with a free alternative.

Together the volunteers installed wireless access points in more 6 buildings around the Tenderloin district that will give over 1,000 low-income San Franciscans access to the internet. Most of the equipment we installed consists of small repeaters mounted to walls near power sources. Each building has one or two main access points that provide internet access, and these repeaters allow Meraki to spread that signal through many levels of the buildings and even from building to building.

It was great to get the team out of the office and do something really good for the community. We got to meet a lot of amazing people at Meraki and other volunteers who were just as excited to be part of such an awesome movement. I know I can speak for the entire team in saying that we all had a lot of fun yesterday and got a lot more out of the experience than we expected. Both myself and the rest of OpenDNS look forward to taking part in future events like this one!

On behalf of everyone at OpenDNS I’d like to thank Mike McCarthy of the San Francisco Department of Telecommunications and Information Services for helping organize San Francisco’s celebration of One Web Day 2008.

So I flew out to CES for a couple meetings this morning and will be here until tomorrow. If you’re a friend of OpenDNS, are here at CES and want to meet up, give me a call at 415-287-7721 or send me an email david _at_ opendns.com.

For now I’m on the show floor now hanging out and walking around… I’d love to get a chance to meet some of you face-to-face.

There’s a reason we run a ton of servers with a bunch of different Internet providers and put them in a lot of different datacenters. That reason is apparent today as we sit in our shiny new offices in San Francisco and watch the lights flicker on and off.

It seems like the SOMA district of San Francisco has been hit with some power issues and with it a datacenter or two was taken offline. San Francisco blogging juggernaut Scott Beale (and he’s much more than a blogger) already posted about the issue and pointed out that lots of popular internet websites are offline now. The list includes Internet advertising company AdBrite, Craigslist, Netflix, Technorati and SixApart.

For those wondering, OpenDNS is online and fine. Our cache will update if any of these sites move datacenters and quickly change IPs. You can use our CacheCheck tool and see for yourself.

And I guess the real point of this post is to say that if you can’t reach some popular Internet sites right now, that’s why. Nothing to do with us.

Update: looks like everyone has recovered, mostly. Glad to see it. 5:15pm Pacific Time

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.

John and Allison
(picture by David)

LaunchPad area
for first-time exhibitors

Kiosk O
for OpenDNS

For three days this week, three members of the OpenDNS team were in Santa Clara, California at ISPCON, sharing OpenDNS with a bustling group of ISPs and infrastructure vendors of all sizes.

The show operated smoothly, and we got the chance to tell lots of new folks about why OpenDNS can deliver great DNS for ISPs and their customers. Tuesday and Wednesday were pretty busy. Thursday morning was quiet, but by that time, so were we!

Launching Accounts for the conference was useful, mostly because there are some great features for ISPs and others running large networks that will be built on top of Accounts.

Many thanks to Denise Miller and the rest of the ISPCON team (The Golden Group) for running a good show and helping us out with some special requests.

We’ve reached a (late) decision, but the verdict is in: we’ll be exhibiting at ISPCON in San Jose, CA, USA on November 7 – 9. As of now, the team in attendance will be David Ulevitch, John Roberts and myself (Allison Rhodes). Why will we be at a conference for ISPs? Visit our Web site on November 7 to find out.

We’d love to meet all of you, so please don’t be shy. If you’re going to the show, drop by kiosk “O” (remember O for OpenDNS) and say hello. We’ll be in the LaunchPad area [PDF of floorplan] next to the Segway Raceway (No, that’s not a typo). We have a few extra Exhibit and Events passes for those of you not planning to go now, but would if the entrance fee were waived. Let us know if you’re interested.

And if you work for an ISP, or are a member of the press (that includes you, bloggers) we’d really love to set up a meeting time in advance – time flies at conferences and we want to make sure we don’t miss each other. Please e-mail contact at opendns dot com and let us know when you have time to chat.

I’ll be in St. Louis, MO for the beginning of next week and would love to meet up with some of you.

Sunday, Monday and Tuesday I will be attending NANOG 38. NANOG is the North American Network Operators Group and is a great place to stay current with cool stuff in the systems, networking and operations fields. The meeting also coincides with ARIN‘s meeting. ARIN, if you don’t already know, is the group that manages IP address allocations and assignments for North America. It manages the policy that its members (ISPs and networks mostly) fall under when requesting and managing IP space. It’s a great group that masterfully handles what seems like an easy task but is actually quite complicated.

If you want to try and meet while I’m in town just shoot me an email or reply below. I’ll be staying at the Knight Center at my Alma Mater, Washington University in St. Louis (also a NANOG sponsor). It’s not far from where the conference is and it keeps me near Clayton and University City, two of my favorite St. Louis neighborhoods.