The Sombrero…!

The Sombrero is an award given to a Systems Administrator, the award is given when a mistake is made. There are varying categories of the award, the simple peasant Sombrero like the one below. This award came into being as a result of the attitude of some systems admins, the work they did wasn’t up to the standard of a “Cowboy” so the thought was that the “Mexican Bandit” would be a better description of the standard – hence the “Sombrero”.

This type of sombrero is just a plain and simple I cocked up sombrero, usually for some thing simple. The type of mistake that is easy to make, in the day to day work as a systems Administrator.

We have all had ownership of one of these from time to time, for reasons like finding out that the system has not had some thing set up correctly or the wrong version of software has been installed during the build. This is the simplest award that can be given to a systems administrator when things don’t go according to plan, some people make a habit of collecting it and some just can’t help it – it’s only yours until someone takes it off you.

A more difficult sombrero to win is the dress sombrero, the one that you don’t want people to see you in. Awarded less frequently than the basic sombrero, but for a moreserious cockup.

 Here we see a recipient of the dress sombrero, notice the happy go lucky expression on the recipients face. This is awarded for more significant blunders those that are noticed by the user community, these usually involve an outage on a server or application but could be something as simple as shutting down the inetd while using telnet to connect to a server.

This sombrero was originally the main sombrero, it has been awarded for restoring a three day old systems backup on a live server. I myself won it for a typo which caused the /home file system to be mirrored into the middle of a production database. On one occasion it was awarded to a site engineer who powered off the wrong server causing a major outage.

The final sombrero award is the best, hard to win on your own. This award is really a team award, here you need to have made an effort. There are several things to take into consideration before making this award, was there a total lack of understanding of the magnitude of the task, was there a total lack of communication, was the cockup compounded by teamwork – here we introduce the “Three Amigos Sombrero”.

Here we see the perfect example of recipients of this award, riding in to save the day – totally unaware of the havoc that’s about to be unleashed by the combined actions of the team.

Self assured, confident to the extreme, certain that they will be the saviors of the day and of course completely wrong.