Quotes About Sysadmin

Zawinski: Sometimes. I end up doing all the sysadmin crap, which I can't stand-I've never liked it. I enjoy working on XScreenSaver because in some ways screen savers-the actual display modes rather than the XScreenSaver framework-are the perfect program because they almost always start from scratch and they do something pretty and there's never a version 2.0. There's very rarely a bug in a screen saver. It crashes-oh, there's a divide-by-zero and you fix that.

Van was a type-two sysadmin, over six feet tall, long ponytail, bobbing Adam's apple. Over his toast-rack chest, his tee said CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON and featured a row of polyhedral RPG dice. Felix was a type-one admin, with an extra seventy or eighty pounds all around the middle, and a neat but full beard that he wore over his extra chins. His tee said HELLO CTHULHU and featured a cute, mouthless, Hello Kitty–style Cthulhu.

The new sysadmin won't power down a machine, replace a failing disk drive, reboot, and restore from backup; he'll write software to detect a misbehaving EC2 instance automatically, destroy the bad instance, spin up a new one, and configure it, all without interrupting service. With

The new sysadmin won't power down a machine, replace a failing disk drive, reboot, and restore from backup; he'll write software to detect a misbehaving EC2 instance automatically, destroy the bad instance, spin up a new one, and configure it, all without interrupting service.

With automation at this level, the new "ops guy" won't care if he's responsible for a dozen systems or 10,000. And the modern BOFH is, more often than not, an old-school sysadmin who has chosen not to adapt.