SysAdmin of the Year - Ode to Jed
November 5, 2007 Posted by Al Castle

trackback Categories: Friends, Insider, PRWeb, Puter Stuff, Techy

I wrote this last month(?) or whenever System Administrators day was, to enter Jed in for a contest. I’m not sure if this is the final version I sent or not.

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PRWeb was small company two years ago with less than 15 employees running all operations on a single antiquated home built Linux server. In order to keep pace with our explosive growth Jed researched, designed and implemented a robust and scalable network infrastructure that in short order doubled our profits, and enticed many a buyer until we sold to Vocus last year for a tidy sum.

Our entire operation is web based, including the interfaces used by our customers and internal staff. If for whatever reason DDOS, bad cable, dead router, code typo, caused the databases or websites to fail we could not accept payment from customers or provide the services for those payments and our internal staff would be sitting there unable to do their job, which is 24/7 year round. During our explosive growth to clusters of redundant database and web servers there were a few problems, most corrected before any customer or employee realized, others cropped up, especially the DDOS and other attacks from China in the wee hours of the night. In all cases Jed was the point man, first to be called in the wee hours despite having two small children, one new born - ie complete lack of sleep.

His dedication, knowledge and resourcefulness is impressive to say the least. In short our company would not have had the extreme success we’ve achieved without this scruffy individual who has sustained many a war injury on sharp edges from generic PC cases, bruises from contorting during late non-peak times to install 4U terabyte servers single handedly in cramped data center cabinets, and of course the mental trauma all support staff deal with when having to address users and customers directly.

He’s been the administrator of it all single handedly, systems, network, web, database, email, network engineer, hardware monkey, programmer and technical support. Intimate knowledge of every major networking protocol and service. Having written some of the most advanced bash shell scripts for backups, automation and other tasks. A warrior monk - Python, Perl, Java, Bash, Awk, Sed, PHP, Javascript, HTML, XML, CSS are not so much languages as melee weapons he wields. His minions, MySQL cluster trolls, load balancer orcs, powerful Apache elves, and Cyrus wizards and a host of hobbit like user workstations. A vast interconnected machine greater than the sum of its individual electronic components and miles of cabling rumble - he’s in tune with all of it. It’s a bit creepy at first, if you watch him working, he’ll suddenly stiffen as if he’s wondering if anyone heard him fart, over the sound of his speed death metal blaring, but its almost a sixth or seventh sense with him that he knows something is afoot on one of the servers even before one of his monitoring script alerts him.

Its not merely that Jed did all this, perhaps there are a few highly intelligent individuals who could have taught themselves and completed all of this in a few years. Nor is it that he has done so with the good attitude of a crufty old Unix admin that he must channel. (We call him the Mumbler among other things.) It is that we of PRWeb / Vocus have all benefited in ways that most of the staff and executives can not even comprehend except in the loosest of ways when they refer to “The Server”. He is the Morlock Supreme of this company, a thankless and sleepless position he maintains and protects so that everyone else can sleep soundly, IM their friends, watch Youtube videos and of course email and do their jobs without thinking what makes it all work and grow. Day after day he is Sisyphus and Atlas and my friend.

To Jed. Thank you