W3perl - Fun - Know your Unix System Admin

KNOW YOUR UNIX SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR-- A FIELD GUIDE

There are four major species of Unix sysad :

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.
The ADMINISTRATIVE FASCIST: Usually a retentive drone (or rarely, a harridan ex-secretary) who has been forced into system administration.
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.
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 ?
Situations :

Low disk space.
Excessive CPU usage.
New account creation.
Root disk fails.
Poor network response.
User questions.
Stupid user questions.
Process accounting management.
Religious war, BSD vs. System V.
Religious war, System V vs. AIX.
Balky printer daemons.
OS upgrade.
Balky mail.
Users want phone list application.

Typical .cshrc file.
Hobbies :

Technical.
Non technical.

Presidential election :

1992.
1996.

Compound system administrators.

Stephan Zielinski