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.

HOW TO IDENTIFY YOUR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR

Situation: Low disk space.

• Technical Thug

  Writes a suite of scripts to monitor disk usage, maintain a database of historic disk usage, predict future disk usage via least squares regression analysis, identify users who are more than a standard deviation over the mean, and send mail to the offending parties. Places script in cron. Disk usage does not change, since disk-hogs, by nature, either ignore script-generated mail, or file it away in triplicate.

• Administrative Fascist

  Puts disk usage policy in motd. Uses disk quotas. All macs.

• Administrative Fascist

  Puts user support policy in motd. Maintains queue of questions. Answers them when he gets a chance, often within two weeks of receipt of the proper form.

• Maniac

  Screams at users until they go away. Sometimes barters knowledge for powerful drink and/or sycophantic adulation.

• Idiot

  Answers all questions to best of his knowledge until the user realizes few UNIX systems support punched cards or JCL.

Situation: *Stupid* User Questions

• Technical Thug

  Answers question in hex, binary, postfix, and/or French until user gives up and goes away.

• Administrative Fascist

  Locks user's account until user can present documentation demonstrating their qualification to use the machine.

• Maniac

  # cat >> ~luser/.cshrc
  alias vi 'rm \!*;unalias vi;grep -v BoZo ~/.cshrc > ~/.z; mv -f ~/.z ~/.cshrc'
  ^D
  

• Idiot

  Answers all questions to best of his knowledge. Recruits user to system administration team.

Situation: Process Accounting Management

• Technical Thug

  Ignores packaged accounting software; trusts scripts to sniff out any problems & compute charges.

• Administrative Fascist

  Devotes 75% of disk space to accounting records owned by root and chmod'ed 000.

• Maniac

  Laughs fool head off at very mention of accounting.

• Idiot

  # lpr /etc/wtmp /usr/adm/paact
  

Situation: Religious War,s, load average: 6.49, 6.45, 6.31 # wall Well, it's upgrade time. Should take a few hours. And good luck on that 5:00 deadline, guys! We're all pulling for you! ^D

Idiot

# dd if=/dev/rmt8 of=/vmunix

Situation: Balky Mail

• Technical Thug

  Rewrites sendmail.cf from scratch. Rewrites sendmail in SNOBOL. Hacks kernel to implement file locking. Hacks kernel to implement "better" semaphores. Rewrites sendmail in assembly. Hacks kernel to ...

• Administrative Fascist

  Puts mail use policy in motd. Locks accounts that go over mail use quota. Keeps quota low enough that people go back to interoffice mail, thus solving problem.

• Maniac

  # kill -9 `ps -augxww | grep sendmail | awk '{print $2}'`
  # rm -f /usr/spool/mail/*
  # wall
  Mail is down.  Please use interoffice mail until we have it back up.
  ^D
  # write max
  I've got my boots and backpack.  Ready to leave for Mount Tam?
  ^D
  
  

• Idiot

  # echo "HELP!" | mail tech_support.AT.vendor.com%kremvax%bitnet!BIFF!!!
  

Situation: Users Want Phone List Application

• Technical Thug

  Writes RDBMS in perl and Smalltalk. Users give up and go back to post-it notes.

• Administrative Fascist

  Oracle. Users give up and go back to post-it notes.

• Maniac

  Tells the users to use flat files and grep, the way God meant man to keep track of phone numbers. Users give up and go back to post-it notes.

• Idiot

  % dd ibs=80 if=/dev/rdisk001s7 | grep "Fred"
  
  

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Other Guidelines

Typical Root .cshrc File

• Technical Thug

  Longer than eight kilobytes. Sources the output of a perl script, rewrites itself.

• Administrative Fascist

  Typical lines include:

  umask 777
  alias cd 'cd \!*; rm -rf ching *hack mille omega rogue xtrek >& /dev/null &'
  

• Maniac

  Typical lines include:

  alias rm 'rm -rf \!*'
  alias hose kill -9 '`ps -augxww | grep \!* | awk \'{print $2}\'`'
  alias kill 'kill -9 \!* ; kill -9 \!* ; kill -9 \!*'
  alias renice 'echo Renice\?  You must mean kill -9.; kill -9 \!*'
  

• Idiot

  Typical lines include:

  alias dir ls
  alias era rm
  alias kitty cat
  alias process_table ps
  setenv DISPLAY vt100
  

Hobbies, Technical

• Technical Thug

  Writes entries for Obsfuscated C contest. Optimizes INTERCAL scripts. Maintains ENIAC emulator. Virtual reality .

• Administrative Fascist

  Bugs office. Audits card-key logs. Modifies old TVs to listen in on cellular phone conversations. Listens to police band.

• Maniac

  Volunteers at Survival Research Labs. Bugs office. Edits card-key logs. Modifies old TVs to listen in on cellular phone conversations. Jams police band.

• Idiot

  Ties shoes. Maintains COBOL decimal to roman numeral converter. Rereads flowcharts from his salad days at Rand.

Hobbies, Nontechnical

• Technical Thug

  Drinks "Smart Drinks." Attends raves. Hangs out at poetry readings and Whole Earth Review events and tries to pick up Birkenstock MOTAS.

• Administrative Fascist

  Reads Readers Digest and Mein Kampf. Sometimes turns up car radio and sings along to John Denver. Golfs. Drinks gin martinis. Hangs out in yuppie bars and tries to pick up dominatrixes.

• Maniac

  Reads Utne Reader and Mein Kampf. Faithfully attends Dickies and Ramones concerts. Punches out people who say "virtual reality." Drinks damn near anything, but favors Wild Turkey, Black Bush, and grain alcohol. Hangs out in neighborhood bars and tries to pick up MOTAS by drinking longshoremen under the table .

• Idiot

  Reads _Time_ and _Newsweek_-- and *believes* them. Drinks Jagermeister. Tries to pick up close blood relations-- often succeeds, producting next generation of idiots.

1992 Presidential Election

• Technical Thug

  Clinton, but only because he liked Gore's book.

• Administrative Fascist

• Maniac

  Frank Zappa.

• Idiot

  Perot.

1996 Presidential Election

• Technical Thug

  Richard Stallman - Larry Wall.

• Administrative Fascist

  Nixon - Buchanan.

• Maniac

  Frank Zappa.

• Idiot

  Quayle.

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Compound System Administrators

• Technical Fascist

  Hacks kernel & writes a horde of scripts to prevent folk from ever using more than their fair share of system resources. Resulting overhead and load brings system to its knees.

• Technical Maniac

  Writes scripts that SEEM to be monitoring the system, but are actually encrypting large lists of passwords. Uses nearby nodes as beta test sites for worms.

• Technical Idiot

  Writes superuser-run scripts that sooner or later do an "rm -rf /".

• Fascistic Maniac

  At first hint of cracker incursions, whether real or imagined, shuts down system by triggering water-on-the-brain detectors and Halon system.

• Fascistic Idiot

  # cp /dev/null /etc/passwd
  

• Maniacal Idiot

  Napalms the CPU.

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Arg Sez "Click Here, eh"