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...to know him was to love him. And to love him was to know him. Those who know him LOVED him - while those who did not know him, loved him from afar... -- Data/Graves, "The Schizoid Man", stardate 42437.5
From nntp-server.caltech.edu!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!\ cs.utexas.edu!uunet!looking!funny-request Thu Nov 19 06:53:10 PST 1992 Article: 2484 of rec.humor.funny Path: nntp-server.caltech.edu!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!\ cs.utexas.edu!uunet!looking!funny-request Message-ID: Date: Thu, 19 Nov 92 3:25:10 EST Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny From: [email protected] (szielins.US1) Subject: Field Guide to System Administrators Keywords: laugh, original, computers Approved: [email protected] Lines: 419

Know Your Unix System Administrator
---A Field Guide

There are four major species of Unix sysad:

  1. The TECHNICAL THUG. Usually a systems programmer who has been forced into system administration; writes scripts in a polyglot of the Bourne shell, sed, C, awk, perl, and APL.
  2. The ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST. Usually a retentive drone (or rarely, a harridan ex-secretary) who has been forced into system administration.
  3. The MANIAC. Usually an aging cracker who discovered that neither the Mossad nor Cuba are willing to pay a living wage for computer espionage. Fell into system administration; occasionally approaches major competitors with indesp schemes.
  4. The IDIOT. Usually a cretin, morpohodite, or old COBOL programmer selected to be the system administrator by a committee of cretins, morphodites, and old COBOL programmers.
Note from Chris:
I found this list at http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~werdna/sysadmins.html#1.
I did not write any part of it (but I wish I had! Mahaha!!).
This is only a VERY small part of the entire list. If you like it, go check it out.
[Back to UNIX]

-- TYPICAL ROOT .cshrc FILE: --

TECHNICAL THUG: Longer than eight kilobytes. Sources the output of a perl script, rewrites itself.

ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST: Typical lines include:

umask 777 alias cd 'cd \!*; rm -rf ching *hack mille omega rogue xtrek >& /dev/null &' MANIAC: Typical lines include: alias rm 'rm -rf \!*' alias hose kill -9 '`ps -augxww | grep \!* | awk \'{print $2}\'`' alias kill 'kill -9 \!* ; kill -9 \!* ; kill -9 \!*' alias renice 'echo Renice\? You must mean kill -9.; kill -9 \!*' IDIOT: Typical lines include: alias dir ls alias era rm alias kitty cat alias process_table ps setenv DISPLAY vt100

--SITUATION: Low disk space. --

TECHNICAL THUG: Writes a suite of scripts to monitor disk usage, maintain a database of historic disk usage, predict future disk usage via least squares regression analysis, identify users who are more than a standard deviation over the mean, and send mail to the offending parties. Places script in cron. Disk usage does not change, since disk-hogs, by nature, either ignore script-generated mail, or file it away in triplicate.

ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST: Puts disk usage policy in motd. Uses disk quotas. Allows no exceptions, thus crippling development work. Locks accounts that go over quota.

MANIAC:

# cd /home # rm -rf `du -s * | sort -rn | head -1 | awk '{print $2}'`; IDIOT: # cd /home # cat `du -s * | sort -rn | head -1 | awk '{ printf "%s/*\n", $2}'` | compress [Back ][ Top]