![[Main Page]](/skins/common/images/wiki.png)
There are four major species of Unix system administrators:
- 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.
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.