That's funny. I had a boss once catch me surfing the web, and when I apologized he said "Hey, I *WANT* my Unix admin to be bored. If he's not I know there's something bad going on."

Of course, surfing isn't the correct option (at least not too often), but you get the point. Your situation isn't unique at all. Many Unix jobs are like firefighting - lots of waiting around, then intense activity dealing with the bad stuff when it happens. If you have a test envirionment where you can work on servers that won't impact production do your "playing around" there. If not, at least try to scrounge up a spare PC or old server and install linux, Solaris x86, or something similar to have a box you can work on without worries.

Also, see if you can think up a project that would help the company that you can work on without touching production machines. If it is really worthwhile, you might be able to talk your boss into funding it. I have no idea what your environment is like, but here's an example of the kind of thing I'm thinking of. If you don't already have a monitoring solution to watch all your servers see if you can get them to buy you a small, cheap server to install Nagios and set up monitoring. That would teach you all about SNMP and probably a bunch of scripting as well. You could set up the Nagios server and have it monitor just a few PCs or test servers at first. Once you've proved it is working and won't hurt anything roll it out to the real servers. If that isn't applicable to you think of something else. Make it a project where you get to learn a new skill or software package, but the company benefits as well so they'll want you to do it.

Ralph