As a systems administrator, it doesn’t sit very easy when things go well. What I mean by that is that you generally look for a job to go well, but always expect some problems. When a job goes without a hitch you start looking for what has been missed, you know the things that are going to bite you in a months time! Well today was such a day, we had two systems to DR and some testing to do on network failover and all of it worked first time!
So what are you bitching about I hear you ask, when you work with systems that are used by muppets you have to expect the unexpected – don’t you? I mean things did go a bit awry today, but only for other people. I had an email from our European colleagues, it basically said “You know the scripts we wrote for the Solaris systems, well someone ran it on an AIX box and it shredded it!”. Had he been able to see the smile I’m sure he wouldn’t have been happy, but when the only difference between the names is the letter “a” and “s” (look at the keyboard) they are next to each other. Then these kinds of accidents are going to happen, especially when people use cut and paste!
The modern world isn’t used to the old style systems administrator, it’ll probably never be ready for them. They are the people that when they want to make fascists look like communists, they are the people that say “Ok no pay rise, no backups then”. When an old style systems administrator says “I’m working from home today”, what he doesn’t say is “because I don’t want to wear pants”. As you can see the modern world isn’t ready for that, it probably never will be. But it will never be ready for the old style systems administrator not being there, mainly because the new style systems administrator couldn’t beat a one legged man in an ass kicking competition.
Still even as an old style systems administrator it doesn’t sit easy when things go so well!