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There Are Two Types of Sysadmins: 45 Jokes Only Ops Will Get

45 'There are two types of people' jokes for sysadmins: backups you tested vs backups you have, DNS denial, the 3 a.m. page, password resets, VPNs, and least privilege.

Ishan Karunaratne⏱️ 2 min readUpdated
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45 'two types of people' jokes for sysadmins: tested backups vs backups you have, DNS denial, the 3 a.m. page, password resets, VPNs, and least privilege.

What are "There are two types of people" jokes? They are a short humor format that splits people into two opposing habits or types, here sysadmins, usually opening with "there are two types of sysadmins."

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.

See also

Sources

Authoritative references this article was fact-checked against.

TagsHumorJokesThere Are Two Types of PeopleSysadminOn-callSecurity

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Ishan Karunaratne

Software Systems Architect · Senior Software Engineer · Engineering Leadership

Software systems architect and senior software engineer with more than two decades designing, building, and running production software, Linux systems, and DevOps infrastructure, and lately working AI into the stack. Now a CTO, though what I write here is drawn from the full arc of that work, across architecture, engineering, and operations, not any single job.

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