45 There Are Two Types of People: Sysadmin Edition

There are two types of sysadmins: those who test their backups, and those who have backups.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who say "it's not DNS," and those who were wrong.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who documented the fix, and those who are the fix.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who get the alert, and those who get the alert from the CEO.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who set the cert to auto-renew, and those who find out during the demo.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who close the ticket, and those who reopen it with "still happening."

There are two types of sysadmins: those who automate the task, and those who have done it by hand 400 times.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who said "it should be a five-minute change," and those who got to go home.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who test the restore, and those who learned at restore time that the backup was empty.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who monitor the monitoring, and those whose monitoring was down for a week.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who read the change request, and those who approved the title of it.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who label the cables, and those who follow a cable by tugging gently and praying.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who reset the user's password, and those who reset it again twenty minutes later.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who write the runbook, and those whose runbook is on the server that's down.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who use a jump box, and those who exposed SSH to the whole internet and named it temp.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who rotate credentials, and those whose root password lives in a file called passwords.txt.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who planned the maintenance window, and those who became the maintenance window.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who check disk space, and those paged at 3 a.m. because /var was full.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who read the man page, and those who run it with --force and find out.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who say "the VPN is fine," and those connecting to the VPN to check the VPN.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who tag servers clearly, and those maintaining server, server2, and newserver-old.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who reboot it, and those who first ask "when did it last reboot?" and go quiet.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who follow least privilege, and those who gave everyone admin to close the ticket.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who tested the failover, and those whose failover failed over to nothing.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who deprovision the leaver, and those whose ex-coworker still has prod access from 2019.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who answer the ticket, and those who reply "works as designed" and feel nothing.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who keep firmware updated, and those who won't touch it because it's finally working.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who enforce MFA, and those who will, right after this one incident.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who keep spares on the shelf, and those driving to the data center on a Sunday.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who renew the domain, and those who learned it expired from the customers.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who closed the port, and those who left 8080 open "temporarily" in 2020.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who whitelist the one IP, and those who whitelisted 0.0.0.0/0 and went home.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who script the onboarding, and those who clicked nineteen checkboxes by hand for the new hire.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who write the postmortem blameless, and those who name the intern.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who read logs proactively, and those who grep them frantically at 3 a.m.

There are two types of sysadmins: those calm during the outage, and those calm because they already updated their resume.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who scheduled the reboot, and those whose "quick reboot" did not come back.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who say "I'll just SSH in real quick," and those locked out by their own firewall rule.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who answer the on-call phone, and those who routed it to the backup who quit last month.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who patch on schedule, and those who patch during the incident.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who trust the documentation, and those who trust it right up until the demo.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who set the split tunnel, and those routing the whole company's Netflix through the office.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who fixed it so fast nobody believes there was an incident, and those still writing the report.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who say "low priority," and those who watched low priority become the only priority.

There are two types of sysadmins: those who left at the end of the shift, and those whose shift left without them.