KNOW YOUR UNIX SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR


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.


SITUATION: Low disk space


SITUATION: Excessive CPU usage.


SITUATION: New account creation.


SITUATION: Root disk fails.


SITUATION: Poor network response.


SITUATION: User questions.


SITUATION: *Stupid* user questions.


SITUATION: Process accounting management.


SITUATION: Religious war, BSD vs. System V.


SITUATION: Religious war, System V vs. AIX


SITUATION: Balky printer daemons.


SITUATION: OS upgrade.


SITUATION: Balky mail.


SITUATION: Users want phone list application.


TYPICAL ROOT .cshrc FILE:


HOBBIES, TECHNICAL:


HOBBIES, NONTECHNICAL:


COMPOUND SYSTEM ADMINISTRATORS: