🖥️ In Memory of the Sysadmin of the Past
A eulogy for the ones who kept the world running and never asked for credit.
They didn’t have cloud consoles.
They didn’t have auto-healing instances.
What they had… was a chair that squeaked, a terminal that blinked,
and a pager that never stayed silent for long.
They were the Sysadmins of the Past.
Born of DOS prompts and 10Base-T.
Raised on LILO, GRUB, and the sacred texts of man 7 signal.
They knew the sounds of a SCSI drive failing like a mechanic knows a bad alternator.
These were the keepers of the /etc, the watchers of the cron.
The high priests of init.d,
who could rebuild a server while talking a manager through resetting the fax machine.
They worked behind locked doors, in rooms lit by fluorescent hum.
A can of compressed air in one hand,
a cup of old gas station coffee in the other.
They did not wear suits.
They wore cargo pants, and keys on a belt loop.
And they knew things.
When a Novell bindery broke, they fixed it—without Google.
When the backup tape jammed, they unjammed it—without a ticket.
When a rack mount server beeped at 3AM,
they got out of bed and drove to the office.
They were sysadmins when sysadmin meant fire control.
Not SRE. Not “DevOps.”
Just admins.
Of systems.
Real ones.
And their tools?
top
vi
rsync
screen
…and knowing exactly where the problem was by the tone in someone’s voice.
They didn’t chase KPIs.
They chased uptime.
They chased silence in the server room.
And if you ever got to watch one resurrect a dead RAID array at 5:47 AM
while listening to Depeche Mode from a tinny PC speaker…
you witnessed art.
đź“Ľ We lost more than just hardware when that era passed.
We lost the craft. The instinct.
The sysadmin who knew when a cable was bad just by looking at it.
But some of them are still out there.
Quiet. Watching.
Still running email servers for family.
Still running IRC for five old friends.
Still booting NetWare in VMs—just to feel something.
To those who logged in with root@console and made the world work before anyone noticed it needed working…
đź–¤ We remember you.
#sysadminlife #linux #novellnetware
