It's a job title that has fallen out of fashion but system administrators are a vital part of making sure our applications and servers keep on working reliably. And today is the one day of the year when we acknowledge their efforts. It's SysAdmin Day.

While many of the jobs done by system admins are now automated or simplified through GUIs, wizards and other graphical tools, there are times when you still need to get down and dirty, entering information on a command line. If nothing else, it’s often faster to type a string of commands and options that shuffle through a bunch of screens, hitting a “next” button. PuTTY has been an essential tool of admins for years. And it’s just been upgraded to Version 0.69. At this rate, it could reach version 1.0 by the time I’m retired.

Earlier this week, we came across a thread on the Sysadmin subreddit that queried IT administrators about the oldest piece of equipment that they supported in their companies. We've pulled out a few choice responses and we'd love for any administrators lurking around on Lifehacker Australia to give us their answer to the question: What's the oldest legacy system you're supporting now?

Earlier this week, a set of vulnerabilities were released that can crash or cause other issues with certain versions of the Network Time Protocol (NTP) daemon, used to synchronise clocks on a variety of computers, with a single malformed packet. This bug affects only affects some Windows systems but other vulnerabilities have also been found that impact some Linux machines along with a number of embedded devices. While these security flaws can't crash servers or computers, it can have severe and unexpected flow-on effects. If you want to find out if your systems are affected and how to apply fixes before different vendors bring out their own patches, read on.

By exploiting a design fault in the Linux boot process that decrypts encrypted hard drives, you can launch a shell with root privileges on the operating system. This security flaw has been confirmed to affect Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora with many other Linux distributions likely to be vulnerable. We have a detailed breakdown of how this vulnerability works and a way to fix the problem on affected systems.