If you’ve been following along on the OpenDNS blog, you know that over the past few weeks we’ve made it our mission to celebrate and reward system administrators, with both the SysAdmin of the Year Awards, and our upcoming System Administrator Appreciation Party. System Administrator Appreciation Day is fast approaching — July 30 — and with it comes the promise of kudos and thanks from the people you work with.

But what if you think that there’s a possibility your boss or manager might not remember about System Administrator Appreciation Day? We’ve got you covered there as well, thanks to our one-step boss reminder service. All you need to do is fill out the important info — your name, your boss’ name and email*, etc — on this handy form and we’ll email your boss on your behalf. Here’s what the message will look like:

_{*We promise not to use your email, or your boss’ email for anything except the friendly reminder service.}

The nominations have been submitted, the votes have been tallied, and our esteemed panel of judges have deliberated for hours. The results? We’re excited to give SysAdmin of the Year honors to Paul Dobbs.

What makes Paul worthy of the prize? He works at the John Howard Society of Durham Region, a nonprofit in Ontario Canada that provides services to nearly 20,000 people per year — and he has a budget of zero dollars per year. Without any annual budget, Paul has increased technology access from 45 computers to nearly 200 computers, from one old NT server to six 2003-R2 servers, unified the network between all offices and reduced Internet costs by more than $6,000 per year.

As Paul has gotten JHS new equipment through grants and funding proposals, he’s put the organization in a position where it can actually give computers away to others; it now donates complete systems to JHS clients who have no financial resources to buy their own.

Paul isn’t the only winner though; here are the other talented award winners:

K-12 Award: In addition to managing a network of 700 computers, Saint Francis High School’s Larry Steinke has also made the entire campus wireless, set up Saint Frances on VOIP phones, installed Smartboards and created a technology committee to review and establish IT plans. Myron Nessan, Saint Francis’ director of finance, says “he does all this with great personality, professionalism and purpose which is appreciated by all he works with.”

DevOps Award: The award for DevOps excellence goes to R.I. Pienaar. He wrote mcollective, a distributed sysadmin framework, runs DevOps meetings in London and is a great contributor to Puppet.

Flying Solo Award: Not too many SysAdmins can say their work saves lives, but Espen Ødegaard can. When the Conficker worm attacked all the workstations as the hospital he worked at, Ødegaard worked tirelessly for three days — by himself — to clean up every workstation. “It is not unlikely that his efforts saved lives,” wrote nominator Odd Henriksen, “considering how little information medical personnel had on their patients while their computers were down.”

Shoestring Budget Award: Alec Cedrone, manager of information systems at Weston Nurseries has saved money on everything from installing Ubiquti Bullet2MP himself to looking to liquidated purchasing options, to choosing OpenDNS for Web content filtering. He estimates his thrifty ways have saved the company almost $35,000.

Neat Freak Award: Given to Kris Wessels, a SysAdmin in the department of computer science at K.U. Leuven in Belgium. Complete photographic evidence of his cabling prowess can be found here.

Disaster Response: While taking a long awaited vacation, Matt Sokolow was texted by his boss. There was no Internet connectivity, no network connectivity at the office — nothing was working. Matt wins the disaster response award for spending three plus hours while on vacation on the phone with a general manager, walking her through everything from restarting a DHCP server to reading error logs to restoring from a backup.

Large Scale Deployment Award: When Dale Hobbs, network administrator for Lush Cosmetics, began to investigate what employees at Lush’s retail stores were looking at online, he realized the bulk of their web traffic was to non work-related sites. The solution was to deploy OpenDNS — at 149 retail locations across the country. The results? A boost in employee productivity, cost savings for the company, and being given the Large Scale Deployment Award.

Paul will receive a pass to The USENIX Association’s 24th Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA ’10) — valued at approximately $900 — and the other award winners will all be given a $50 cash prize. Special appreciation to our friends at The USENIX Association for providing the grand prize!

Thanks to all who entered and we hope to see you on July 28th at the System Administrator Appreciation Party!

There are just ten days left to nominate yourself, your friends, and your favorite IT people for the 2010 SysAdmin of the Year Awards.

We’ve already seen a high volume of nominations, particularly in the Flying Solo and Shoestring Budget categories. It’s clear that there are many SysAdmins out there who are making great things happen with limited help, and a limited budget; these two categories are seeing some of the stiffest competition.

Categories where there have been fewer nominations (fewer nominations being equal to a better chance of taking home a cash prize) include :

• Best Disaster Response Award
• Neat Freak Award
• Large-Scale Deployment Award
• DevOps Award
• And the late addition, K–12 Award

It’s easy to send in a nomination. Just email awards at opendns dot com with the award category in the subject line. Follow the instructions for the category in your submission.

And once you send in a nomination (or two!), make sure to RSVP for our System Administrator Appreciation Party on July 28 in San Francisco. Cash prizes, celebratory parties, and even some potential giveaways — who loves SysAdmins more than we do?

While some may associate July with 4th of July, summer vacation and BBQ, here at OpenDNS, July means one thing, and one thing only: System Administrator Appreciation Month.

Along with running a contest to find the SysAdmin of the Year, we’re also celebrating SysAdmins at our fourth annual System Administrator Appreciation Party. This year’s affair will be held at DNA Lounge in San Francisco’s SOMA district (375 Eleventh Street) on July 28th, from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Meet the rockstar engineers from OpenDNS, enjoy ice cold beer and delicious eats, pick up some OpenDNS merch (t-shirts, anyone?) and feel celebrated just for being a SysAdmin. C’mon — you’ve earned it!

You can register here (for free) for the party; once you let us know you are attending, make sure to pass on the invite to your friends. And if you aren’t a SysAdmin, feel free to let your office’s IT folks know.

For those who might travel from out of town, feel free to
email me directly if you need ideas for places to stay while in San Francisco.

We hope to see you there!

Hi! I’m Laura, the newest addition to the OpenDNS team. You can find me here on the OpenDNS blog, on our Twitter account or Facebook page or in a variety of other places helping to get the word out about OpenDNS.

Speaking of getting the word out, in the past several days, we’ve made two exciting announcements:

1. We kicked off the 2010 SysAdmin of the Year Awards with six categories.
2. We announced that one in every three public grade schools in the US is using OpenDNS.

As we talked about OpenDNS in schools and the incoming award nominations, a collective lightbulb went off — we should offer a way to celebrate SysAdmins who work in K-12 education, too! Today we’re adding a new category to the 2010 SysAdmin of the Year awards: a K-12 Award.

K-12 Award

Achieving CIPA compliance, blocking unsafe and inappropriate Websites and protecting students are all in a day’s work for this SysAdmin. Tell us how this SysAdmin deftly balances the demands of school boards, educators and students without breaking a sweat. Draw inspiration from the other categories to show how this SysAdmin earned an A+.

How to nominate a SysAdmin for this or any other award: To submit yourself or a fellow SysAdmin, just email awards at opendns dot com with the award category in the subject line. Follow the instructions for the category in your submission.

Here at OpenDNS we’re all about the SysAdmins. While we’ve made it our mission to ease their lives, we also look for ways to thank them for keeping our networks up and running. One way we do that is by celebrating System Administrator Appreciation Month (July) with all of the related events we put on, including the party (details coming soon – it’s gonna be good this year!).

To kick things off early, today I’m excited to announce the 2010 System Administrator of the Year Awards, the largest contest of its kind and the best way to give a SysAdmin that you respect the cred they deserve. There will be one winner selected in each category by a panel of esteemed judges, including OpenDNS System Administration team members George Patterson and Mack Nagashima, and CEO (and occasional SysAdmin himself) David Ulevitch. Winners in each category will receive a prize of $50, and from all entries the judging committee will choose one winner that stands out among the rest as the official OpenDNS SysAdmin of the Year. We’re still working on details for the Grand Prize, but we aim to please.

The deadline for entries is midnight June 29. Winners will be announced shortly thereafter.

Without further ado, the categories:

Best Disaster Response Award

A hurricane, a fire, an earthquake. A datacenter meltdown. Something that would have caused business operations to shut down completely, if it weren’t for this SysAdmin. Like a knight in shining armor, he or she managed to keep the network up and running. Your submission should include details about the disaster and how the SysAdmin handled it.

Neat Freak Award

SysAdmins take pride in documentation and organization of cabling, wiring and racks. Wow the judges in this category with photo evidence showing that your SysAdmin is the neatest and most organized of them all.

Shoestring Budget Award

This SysAdmin works wonders with a seriously tight budget. Tell us about the SysAdmin with the craziest buildout done on the cheap. We need details for this submission – tell the judges specs, total cost and what kind of awesomeness it powers.

Flying Solo Award

Even with a team of talented operators, SysAdmin’ing is not easy work. But when flying solo it can be downright heroic. Regale us with a (true) story of the heroic SysAdmin who saved the world (or did something awesome) to save the day (or company) all by his or herself.

Large-Scale Deployment Award

Some jobs are too challenging to comprehend, but not for the SysAdmin who wins our Large-Scale Deployment Award. Tell us the story of a SysAdmin who has managed a massive amount of infrastructure from their diety-like fingertips with finesse and elegance. Tell us how big the deployment was, when it was built and what some of the impressive metrics it offered were (pageviews, megahertz, memory, rendering, etc.).

DevOps Award

Often, the most successful SysAdmins are the ones who work well with others. Large websites like Flickr attribute much of their success to the close collaboration between engineering and operations. Share a success story of your own where the SysAdmin’s collaboration played a key role in a successful engineering project. Tell us when this happened, who was involved, and how you know it was successful.

How to nominate a SysAdmin for an award: To submit yourself or a fellow SysAdmin, just email awards at opendns dot com with the award category in the subject line. Follow the instructions for the category in your submission.

Good luck to all! We’re rooting for you!

With more than 25,000 schools and school districts using OpenDNS today (including some of the U.S.’s largest districts), our service has fast become the standard among K-12 schools. Attend our 30 minute webinar this Thursday and learn why.

We’re thrilled to have Gavin Guynes join OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch as co-host. Gavin, a longtime OpenDNS user who runs the network for Mississippi’s Madison County Schools, will tell you all about how he set up OpenDNS quickly and easily and share the many benefits Madison has gained from making the switch. You’ll learn about how the free service can help you achieve CIPA compliance, save your district lots of money and keep your students and staff safe online.

We know you’re busy, so we’ll keep the webinar short and informative – just 30 minutes. When you sign up you’ll be prompted to invite colleagues, so help us spread the word!

“ABCs of OpenDNS for K-12 Schools in the 2009-2010 Year”
Thursday, August 20, 2009
10 AM PDT – 10:30 AM PDT
Register here

We celebrated in San Francisco last night (and thanks to all who made it out – we had a blast and hope you did, too!) but the official System Administrator Appreciation Day is actually tomorrow — Friday, July 31. We’re doing our part to make sure the holiday gets the attention is deserves, but also know your boss probably doesn’t know about it. That changes this year.

Sign up for our free SysAdmin Day Boss Reminding Service. The email your boss will get will look like this. But sign up quickly because we’re sending the emails at 2:30 pm PST!