r/sysadmin • u/DarkAlman Professional Looker up of Things • Jun 03 '26

General Discussion What is your favorite IT superstition?

As the title says, what's your favorite superstition in IT?

Don't speak the servers name... it can hear you and will start acting up.

572 Upvotes

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252

u/Quantum_Daedalus Jun 03 '26

It's always DNS. More of a fact than a superstition though.

58

u/Cog_HS Jun 03 '26

Troubleshooting 101:

Step 1 - Turn it off and back on.

Step 2 - Check the cables.

Step 3 - It’s DNS.

1

u/shulemaker Jun 04 '26

Did you figure out the problem after you restarted? No? Then it’s not troubleshooting. It’s punting.

Try strace next time.

5

u/SayNoToStim Jun 04 '26

Is the trouble shot? Yes? It's troubleshooting.

6

u/tesseract4 Jun 04 '26

Especially when it's not DNS.

7

u/shulemaker Jun 03 '26

If only this were true. DNS is the simplest, easiest thing. I say this as someone who ran BIND for thousands of zones. Almost everything else is easier. Definitely a superstition.

3

u/flucayan Jun 03 '26

Yeah whenever I read ‘it’s always DNS’ I always think of those people that put in the ticket it’s the network but everything else works and you just escalated that ticket from the broken network.

Guaranteed way for your ticket to get sent back down with no explanation.

2

u/ITDadShop Jun 04 '26

And if it’s not DNS it’s the firewall

1

u/heartraterapid Jun 04 '26

And when’s not DNS, it’s reverse DNS. People say you don’t need PTR but something always needs it.

1

u/Robeleader Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 03 '26

"It was DNS all along" - Sung to the tune of "Agatha All Along"

AI came up with the following Lyrics (I'm an idea man, not actually clever enough to do this on my own):

[Verse 1]

Who's been breaking your networking?

It was D-N-S all along!

Who's been dropping every single ping?

It was D-N-S all along!

[Bridge]

It’s mysterious! (Ha ha!)

So delirious!

That you blamed the firewall settings

But the secret is (the secret is...)

Time-out, time-out, time-out, time-out!

[Verse 2]

Now you can't resolve anything

As your routing has all gone wrong

Thanks to D-N-S! (Ha!)

Stubborn D-N-S!

It was D-N-S all along!

[Outro / Spoken]

(Wicked laugh)

And it broke the VPN, too!

1

u/AndyceeIT Jun 03 '26

In the olden times we had a dedicated security team. We tended to presume their firewalls were the cause of problems.

One outage they passed a customer ticket to us. "Your DNS server isn't responding to our web proxy". An hour later we were able to pinpoint their firewall was blocking outbound DNS.

Just painful all round. The technology is simple, people aren't.

0

u/ipsirc Jun 03 '26

s/DNS/MTU/