To all you systems administrators out there, wherever and whomever you are: Happy Systems Administrators Day! That's right, ladies, gentlemen and emacs users, the yearly holiday of sysadmin day is upon us!

This year marks the 17th annual sysadmin day and with any luck 17-fold increase in appreciation to some of the most frequently un-and-under appreciated people in any organization. You deserve a hurrah, some cake and – for some among you – your own private island.

What to do with your day of honour, fellow administrators? How about reading through the archives of Simon Sharwood's excellent On Call series? These are real world stories of your fellow Register sysadmins. Heroes, each and every one.

You can peruse Simon Travaglia's Bastard Operator From Hell series. Or possibly just find someone named Simon and thank them for existing. Chances are they've done something awesome.

Sysadmin Day is basically Christmas for Spiceworks, so you can see what they're up to there. There are also any number of "retweet to win" style please-love-us-on-social-media style campaigns running. Alternately, you can partake in the annual Web 1.0 sysadmin day marketing, slim pickings though it seems to be this year.

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First up is Logz.io, with a sysadmin day survey. Enter and win a chance for a $100 AWS gift card. Thwack (Solarwindws) offers a shot at several goodies if you take a quiz. There are also some neat e-cards.

The Linux Foundation has some free e-learning courses and passes to LinuxCon North America up for grabs, while Altaro has some ThinkGeek vouchers up to the winners of their contest.

Thycotic appears to be trying to do something involving underwear and stickers, however, since it seems to simply redirect to their home page without accomplishing anything useful, I'm going to go with "figuring it out proves you're worthy". (At 3:30am, following 36 hours of chasing obscure Exchange problems, I have proven no longer worthy. It may or may not involve following them on Twitter.)

There are others, but they're all pretty much the same. Sign up for some contest, get a chance at a somewhat mediocre prize. Gone, apparently, are the days where prizes had some stakes to them. If you can squeeze an iPad out of a sysadmin day contest today, you've hit the jackpot for this year.

If the heart's gone out of the industry's marketdroids, rest assured that it hasn't here. The Register loves its readers, and especially its loyal sysadmins. To that end, we're willing to reward the best sysadmin stories with some Register goodies. They're similarly modest prizes, but they're made with love by our roost of tame vultures.

Or something. Is that a pink elephant over there? Wait, no, mail, stop piling up in the outbound queue. What do you mean DNS issue...

Sorry about that. Where was I? Oh yes: Reg stuff for The Register's excellent sysadmins. Entering is simple: drop the aforementioned Simon Sharwood an email detailing your tale of woe.

Above all, you have our thanks. Mine, personally, and that of The Register as a whole. You keep the internet working. You keep the masses of zombies users from starting the apocalypse. You do the impossible.

And that makes you mighty. Happy Systems Administrators Day. ®

Competition Terms and Conditions: The competition will close at 11:49pm GMT on July 31, 2016. The winner will be contacted by email shortly thereafter. A Reg account is required to enter. In the event that the winner cannot be contacted within one week, an alternate winner will be drawn. One entry per person, multiple entries will be discarded. No cash alternative. Employees and associates of Situation Publishing may not enter.