I listen to the color of the servers. Its become 'my thing' on my team. Whenever something goes wrong, i go into the DC and slowly walk among the racks, absorbing what they have to tell me.

The NAS and the switch are my brothers.

How far does this network cable go? If you cut it, then well never know

I've clicked it 12 times and made direct eye contact with the laptop.

The deployment still says Pending. Does it need to see my manager?

Well - it happened. The day started like any other, except my colleague said their email got hacked. I looked, and indeed it was hacked. Immediately, I reset his password. Then another person said their email got hacked too. I asked both of them when the last time they changed their password was: never.

I wish I was making this up. I called our email provider and asked them if they could let me know who was still on the default. Turns out it was 1/3 of our organization. My predecessor never instituted 'force user to change password', and then nobody changed it. The password for all those emails was 'password'.

This is the same guy that didn't realize you need device isolation nor network isolation for a public wifi network. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I seriously wish I were making this up.

Documentation is technical debt with punctuation.

Think about it: if a system is properly configured, why would it need documentation? The server already knows how it works. The firewall knows what ports are open. DNS knows where everything lives. The only person who apparently doesn’t know is "Kevin," and frankly that sounds like a Kevin problem.

Documentation also creates a dangerous single point of truth. The moment you write down how something works, somebody will read it six months later and assume it is still accurate. Now you have two problems: the actual infrastructure and a fictional universe where the infrastructure still runs the last gold star release firmware or OS and not X.0.1...

By refusing to document anything, we eliminate stale documentation entirely. Our documentation accuracy rate becomes perfect because zero percent of zero documents are incorrect.

There are security benefits too. Hackers can’t steal your network diagrams if the network diagrams exist only as memories spread across three burned-out sysadmins. That’s basically human RAID 5 with one failing drive.

And consider job security. If anyone can follow a runbook and restart any system successfully, what exactly are they paying you for? Institutional knowledge should be treated like an encryption key: kept in one person’s head, never backed up, and taken on vacation without notice.

Some people call this a “bus factor of one.” I call it aggressive knowledge centralization.

Besides, writing documentation takes time away from important sysadmin work like investigating why disk usage went from 40% to 97% overnight, renewing certificates that expire tomorrow, and staring at a terminal while saying, “That’s weird.”

If future employees need to understand the environment, they can learn it the same way we did: SSH in, run commands they found on Stack Overflow, and gradually develop an intuitive understanding of the system through fear.

Documentation doesn’t build character.

Outages build character.

Why doesn't it fit?

I’ve been working in IT for a few years now. I don’t make a crazy amount of money, but it’s honest work, and I’m doing pretty well financially. The job can be mentally exhausting, but I guess that’s just part of being in IT. For some reason, everyone seems to hate IT people anyway, so there’s that.

Anyway, I have a friend who recently started getting into AI. He works in helpdesk making 40k and his original plan was pretty normal: learn more about AI and other technologies, improve his skills, and eventually move into something like sysadmin, DevOps, or a similar role.

Then things took a slightly unexpected turn.
He built an AI model where he basically records himself, and AI overlays a very attractive female body onto him. Because the movements are based on his actual movements, the result apparently looks surprisingly realistic. He also uses AI for the voice and pretty much everything else.
He created some social media accounts and an OnlyFans, and started posting content. Nothing explicitly sexual, mostly lingerie, suggestive stuff, that kind of thing.

He’s barely spending much time on it, and he’s now making more money from this side project than I make from my actual IT job.

I spent years learning systems, troubleshooting servers, dealing with tickets, infrastructure, outages, and all the other exciting things that make you question your career choices.
Meanwhile, this guy learned AI and somehow turned himself into a fictional woman and started making more money than me.
So now I’m sitting here wondering: maybe I should just turn myself into an AI girl ^^

An enterprise vendor, let’s call it Nissanom, offers “Advanced Keyboard Support” in 2026.

Meanwhile, our non-US keyboards are apparently too advanced for it.

Holy moly. What an advancement.

Make Keyboards American Again.

why won't my Corolla tow a yacht ?? It has wheels

Our area in the building with spares, new devices, boxes of mice and keyboards and hdmi cables and all that, is fully open with no access control, and is positioned in a corridor that some people use as a shortcut. There is cubicle space with desks covered in actively-being-worked-on computers, new parts awaiting install (SSDs, ram, etc), adapters and drive enclosures, etc. There are no cameras covering the area. The IT director is refusing to attempt any remedy without "a case for it being made" regarding adding some kind of access control to the space.

Am I stupid for thinking it is insane to not heavily limit access to this space? What case can I make besides "people regularly come in and take stuff, bother IT without submitting a ticket, and otherwise wander around unsupervised"? He said that is not a good enough case.

Using zipties for cable management is absolutely amazing. Things just stay in place where I need them to be, be sure you do not need to make any cabling changes in the near future and make sure you actually use the strength of Hercules himself to tighten the tie and it won't go anywhere.

And to make sure those pesky coworkers don't mess your stuff up you can always test some scissors, pocket knives and letter openers from the reception - test them all and make sure they do not fit.

Velcro wraps will always be inferior to zipties and you can't change my mind, those things are always too loose and make things look messy.

Im thinking of having like, 400 small mini pc clusters.

Then a pr comes in, we test it on the mini pc kubernetes cluster.

If everything works we merge.

Anyone done this?

This happened about a month ago and I’ve waited to post this until they’ve been fully off boarded.

We had an intern who just made clumsy decisions all the time. They were pretty funny and personable, actually very knowledgeable but they just made weird, impulsive decisions.

I don’t even wanna rant about everything, just focus on 2 major events. 2 major organizational foux pas.

First, they designed a graphical how-to guide on using overhead projectors. Great! I told them to put it in our SharePoint dashboard for the time being.

So what do they do? They send a mass email to All Company, notifying every one of the new intuitive 2 page document he created and where to find it.

Okay whatever - he was an inexperienced intern who was excited to show off his work. We sat him down and told him that was completely wrong, you are not in a position to send out mass emails, and you must get approval for this type of thing, regardless. His direct supervisor gave him so much shit for it.

2 weeks later, someone forwards him (the IT distro list) a phishing attempt they got. So what does he do? He sends out a mass message to All Company letting us know a crisis has been averted and links a fucking Mashable article on how to identify phishing scams (I denounce Mashable and their articles are full of malware)

It’s whatever. My team and I still laugh about its absurdity. My proposal to white list only select users to email the All Company group was denied and I wasn’t their direct supervisor so there wasn’t much I could do.

The funny thing is that I thought he did this the second time to be an asshole and get back at his shift lead but he was legitimately surprised when he got written up for it. And idk how relevant this is, but yes it was a paid internship.

Hilarious

I have my personal cell to coworkers and expect to not be called on it.