I was on the phone today with a friend of mine who has been a sys admin for about 6 years. Perhaps it's a boring job for him since he has started complaining on just about everything he encounters at work lately. "Is it the people, the env, or just wanting to see a change?" I asked. (having to know him for quite a while I was patiently listening ... well.. sort of) "Well... I've lost my faith and pride for being a sys admin, afterall, the "O-mighty-glory days" is long gone." After x amount of minutes in digging to find out the root-cause of his aggravation, I realized he is not being "valued" to keep the systems up. Instead, he is viewed "valuable" only when he has fixed a major problem in an outage. (so he said..) Perhaps it's the culture of the company's "preserved" since the Internet boom eras; (which I've experienced before) however, I've seen others' with a totally different view. "How about looking over the Preventive tools that my company offers? Perhaps you can better your situation by presenting the data to your managements on how performing proactive work can help bring the uptime of your systems' up?" There are tools like NetConnect, Configuration Services Tracker, Patch Manager, Explorer, and etc to assist in keeping the systems' availability accounted for and much more! Better yet, there are "GRAPHS" and data to prove your point! (those are the favorites among the managements) The great tools are out there and I was glad to help my poor friend out with virutually doing nothing. :-) At times I wonder how soon the companies out there will change from being "reactive" to "proactive". Is it an unchangeable trend that people are used to? Is it the culture? I really wonder...