James Farrell

669 points
James Farrell

I am a long time UNIX system administrator and open source advocate. In recent years my primary focus as been on Linux & FreeBSD systems administration, networking, telecom, and SAN/storage management. I love building infrastructure, tying systems together, creating processes, and bringing people together in support of their technical efforts.

When I can, I try to contribute back to the open source projects either with patches, or by helping others in technical support forums.

Authored Comments

Interesting read, thank you.

I found your comments on employee "reflecting behaviors" correlating to organizational dedication interesting. By any chance did you find evidence of the opposite ... that is, organizational behaviors that limit or discourage reflective behaviors leading to higher employee turnover?

"Thank you" goes a long way. A good sysadmin is not one that constantly fights highly visible fires, but one that prevents the fires in the first place and keeps the shop running. Often people forget that well-running systems do not run themselves, and so it is easy to lose sight of all the work sysadmins do.

I find that appreciation, recognition, and simple end-user "thank you" go a long way to bringing satisfaction to the sysadmin's job.