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🔒 Monitored.
🧠 Maintained.
🪫 Disaster-tested.
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🖥️ 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.
📼 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…
🖤 We remember you.
#sysadminlife #linux #novellnetware
🚧 Reminder from the Admin Trenches: 🚧
Technical hiccups aren’t signs of incompetence—they're proof someone cares enough to keep things updated, tested, and evolving. Active admins aren't immune to trouble; they're just committed enough to face it head-on.
Behind every resilient system is an admin unafraid to get their hands dirty. 👩💻👨💻✨
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#GenesisRadio #JoinUs #Mastodon #TechCommunity #SysAdminLife
Hm. Ich weiß ja nicht was mich gerade mehr frustet. Dass ich mich mit so einer $§%$&§$% Java-Konsole herumschlagen muss, oder dass #uBlock bei einem #iDrac 23 Sachen zum blockieren findet 🤔
Neues Ticket: Softphone geht nicht, kein Audio
Kollege: *läuft zu Anwenderin*
Kollege im Ticket: Headset "funktioniert nicht", USB Headset wurde in den Ethernetanschluss gesteckt
meine Antwort im Ticket: *siehe Bild*
Ihre Ausrede: Ich hatte noch keinen #kaffee
Damit einen schönen #montag. Nur nicht im #buroalltag durchdrehen!
At $job we received 10 new servers.
The disks are configured as "non-RAID".
On Linux, everything is fine.
On Windows, the disk shows I/O errors.
Swapping the disk, still the same.
Checking cables, still the same.
Swapping the OS (Windows on initially Linux machine and Linux on the Windows machine) still the same.
Upgrade to the latest firmware on both disk+PERC and latest driver, still the same.
Converting the disk to single-disk RAID0 fixes the issue.
Any idea what would cause this ? A bug in the Windows driver that appears only when the disk is non-RAID ?
Giving #Pangolin a try…
Very first install experience:
- Installer is a #GoLang binary, which is hard to inspect
- Installer doesn’t tell you the requirements for the initial admin password before asking for it.
- Resulting Pangolin container crashes immediately at the very first attempt to start because of my password.
- There’s no —flag to force the installer to rerun everything
- It IS possible to rerun the installer after manually removing broken containers and config files.
Ich: Ich hab Hunger, mag wer zu Lidl?
Alle: Keine Zeit geh selbst
Ich: wenn ich jetzt alle Anmeldeserver (Active Directory) herunterfahre habt ihr Zeit!
Chefin: Wie immer?
Ich: *nickt zustimmend*
Es muss Vorteile haben die IT zu sein 😅😇
@futzle please!
making fun of windows printing is the thing that makes cups and its quirks tolerable! you can't take that away from us!! it's not fair!!!1!ONE!!
Explore the key elements of System Administration, from endpoint security to IT asset management, in this empowering guide for IT professionals.
System administration is the backbone of IT, empowering efficiency and security. With the right tools, best practices, and a forward-thinking mindset, it shapes the future of IT operations. #SysAdminLife #ITPros
`alias tf-yolo="terraform apply -auto-approve"`
You're welcome.
i shaved 4 megabytes off my backups by settings zstd compression to 10 #SysAdminLife
Tired of Managing Multiple Remote Sessions manually? Here’s the Fix 💡 Read more under https://www.royalapps.com/go/help-ts-win-v7-ref-terminalservices
#RoyalTS #SysAdminLife #RemoteDesktop #ITManagement #TerminalServices #RoyalServer
I'd like to share with you my personal mantras of #sysadminlife - inspired by a certain gitlab now github engineer who shall remain nameless.
Over the last few months, I have filtered out most USA news, so I have basically a minimal knowledge of what is happening in that part of the world. To be honest, it's great! The same goes for tech, I work long 12-hour days and weekends as a sysadmin, and the last thing I want to see after those days is tech stuff. So, I read tech news through newsletters sent to an email address I only use for that purpose.
It’s making my life more relaxed not to care about what is happening on other continents, etc. This way, I can enjoy more fun things, like working on my bike, swimming, and going to the cinema.
I think slowing down is good. Enjoy your morning coffee.
:cupoftea:
#FilteredNews
#RelaxedLife
#WorkLifeBalance
#TechNews
#SysadminLife
#EnjoyingLife
#SlowingDown
Ready to nerd out?
Introducing The Nerdy Sixty — 60 weird, witty, and wonderful IT challenges dropped weekly.
Terminal tricks, tech trivia, and Easter eggs await.
Start your quest now
