very oldschool computer geek: started with Sears brand Pong on an 11" black and white TV, used a variety of 8-bit home computers, including a Commodore PET... for work; in 1992! Got online in '81, dialed up to BBS systems using 300/1200/2400/9600 baud modems and an ADM3A green screen. Got on the internet via a hard-wired serial connection to the campus Prime minicomputer, where I was also introduce to the Amiga. Essentially wound up being an Internet drop-out from that school, and then again when I quit school a second time and started a successful pre-boom era dot.com. Was the sysadmin, we ran HP-UX and Solaris. Along the way, I started one of the world's first websites in '93 (and it's still running under someone else's care and feeding). Ran a dot.bomb into the ground around the millennium, then eventually wound up doing IT consulting (glorified sysadmin, essentially) for a living.
Unlike our namesake, I'm an admin who occasionally writes code, so I have a slightly different take.
This was years ago, and the company in question no longer exists as an ongoing entity, but… my client’s top management, in its infinite wisdom, decided that they needed to have an “all hands on deck” meeting. Literally, everyone in the company, from the CEO down to the receptionist at the front desk, was expected to attend. This meeting started at 9 a.m. and lasted till 11 a.m. EVERY DAY. For SIX MONTHS. Not kidding.
“Maintaining” the 50,000 kVA UPS system that keeps your 24/7/365 production floor running (and generating millions a day in revenue) by replacing the batteries as they fail is not a “best practice”.
Login name: notabro
In real life: Ghost In The Shell
On since 1978 on pts/0 from pong.atari.com
0 seconds Idle Time
Unread mail since Thu Jan 1 00:22:52 1981
Old man from the mountain, yelling at clouds
.`=-._.-=-.-=..-'\
| |
.-._ |-. ./
/'' `. | `-._.--._.-' | .-.
|:. `-./ |.` .)
\ `-._ `---..__..----._/ .'
'-.._'-`-.-._ _..----.__.'
`-.-..-.`--` .-. \
'o/o`\ / >)) /
`-..-.( \ `-' |
.----._.-` .' _).-.
( ) .` _)/ `.
`-._--._ -'.` .-._). \
(_.-._) / | | \
(_ /_| \ |
(_ / | `._/ \
(_ _/ \ | |
(_ _) | / |
(_ _) \ | \
(_ _) `._ \ |
(_ _) |@ /_..--'
(_ _) |@ | |
(_ _) \ / ..\_
(_ _) .'_ '`. `-.
(_ _) (_/ ) \\\ \ \
(_ _) (_/ /| /\_)
(_.-_) LGB (_/(_/
I once had a beard almost this long, and wore a
black leather cowboy hat to work.
I'm here to talk about sysadmin, and grumble about
how you could once run an entire graphical
operating system in 512k of memory, including a
web browser, but today, it takes over a gig of
ram just to display a single web page. You want
the truth? You can't HANDLE the truth: it's a
gorram fraking miracle that our society continues
to function as well as it does, considering how
little skill or effort it would take to "crash"
it (and no, I'm not going to go into the details
of how that might be done). Log4j is a recent
and highly visible demonstration of this. You
really don't want to know how the sausage is
made. Really.