Today is Sysadmin Day – a day for thanking our sysadmins for all the hard work they do in order to keep our networks running smoothly, machines up and websites alive.

To say thanks to the awesome TweetMeme sysadmin team Alex (@alexforrow) and Carl, I have prepared a present in the medium I know best – lolcats.

So thanks to them for all the stupid hours, ridiculous “hacks”, 24/7 messaging alerts, teaching my newb self how to use the linux command line, and my constant “Aleeeeex, why doesn’t this work?” when I’ve made PHP segfault. Scroll down for the sysadmin-related lolcat gallery.

I have two identical computers sitting under my desk – one is running Windows 7 and is doing all the productive stuff, and the other is running Ubuntu Server, and acts as a number of things.

Its primary function is a development box – testing web applications that I concoct usually. But it has an additional function of serving as a backup point for all of my data.

As you may already know, I take data security very seriously – so seriously that I currently have 8 copies of my University work for this year. (If you’re interested, that’s one on my data partition of my computer, one on each of the two hard drives in the server, one on each of the two external drives attached to the server, one on a memory stick, one on my webserver in a datacentre somewhere and one more on Microsoft’s Live Mesh servers.)

The problem I had was that I was want to make it easy to mount the external drives on to the Ubuntu Server, without requiring them to be on when the server was booted (it’s not on all the time). Ubuntu Server does not automatically mount like Ubuntu Desktop, so it was some time for some scripting.