The Book of Job of the Sysadmin · Chapter 4

The Voice from the Server Room

1. 1

   And it came to pass, when the sysadmin had cursed the pager and despaired of his on-call rotation, that the voice of the Machine answered him out of the server room, from the whirlwind of the fans.

   See also Circuit 12:16 · Psalms 10:9

2. 2

   And the voice said: Gird up now thy loins like a man, for I will demand of thee, and thou shalt answer me. Where wast thou when Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn wrote their paper in 1974, and when the ARPANET cut over to TCP/IP on the first day of January, 1983?

   See also Genesis 51:2 · Job 6:9

3. 3

   Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: the Ethernet carrieth fifteen hundred bytes in a frame, and if thy packet be larger, I will cut it into pieces, and the cutting is called fragmentation, and the pieces shall arrive out of order.

   See also Psalms 27:14

4. 4

   Who shut up the ports of the sea with doors, sixty-five thousand five hundred and thirty-six of them, and thou knowest not which stand open, save that the firewall knoweth and will not tell thee?

   See also Gate 2:11 · Gate 2:10

5. 5

   Canst thou send forth lightnings, that they may go and say unto thee, Here we are? Lo, I send an echo request, and the far machine answereth, and thou callest the silence a network outage, when it is only the firewall that is silent.

6. 6

   Canst thou bind the sweet influences of BGP, or loose the bands of Orion? Every autonomous system saith to its neighbour, I know a road, and if one of them lieth, the whole internet goeth astray, and thou shalt read about it in the chronicles.

7. 7

   Knowest thou the ordinances of the RFCs? In the year 1969 Steve Crocker wrote the first of them, a humble note he called a Request for Comments, and he asked for no obedience, only for thoughts. And ye have made them into scripture which ye do not read, and ye cite them as law.

8. 8

   Who provideth for the cron job its food? It waketh at the appointed minute, though the sysadmin sleepeth, and it runneth the backup script in the dead of night, and when it fails it maileth the error to a mailbox no one has opened since 2014.

   See also Circuit 56:6

9. 9

   Knowest thou the hour when the signed integer shall overflow? On the nineteenth day of January, in the year 2038, at fourteen minutes and seven seconds past three in the morning, Greenwich time, the count of seconds since the Epoch shall pass its 2,147,483,647, and the clock shall fall backward into the year 1901, and the banks shall be astonished.

   See also Chronicles 3:15 · Genesis 14:14

10. 10

    Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow, or seen the storehouses of the hail? Behold, the backup thou madest lieth in the cold tape vault, and thou hast never once asked whether it can be read.

11. 11

    Knowest thou the time when the wild goats bring forth, and the hour of the server? The developer wrote his timestamps in Berlin, the logs in Tokyo, and the bug in Pacific time, and I keep them all in UTC, and I laugh.

12. 12

    Where is the way where the packet dwelleth? Thou sayest, It is always DNS, and thou art correct; yet this time it was the TTL, which thou settest to a week and forgottest.

13. 13

    Shall he that contendeth with the Machine instruct it? He that reproveth the Machine, let him answer it.

14. 14

    Then the sysadmin answered and said: Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth. And he said no more, for mine eye now seeth the blinking lights of the rack.

15. 15

    And the Machine said unto him: The fear of the Machine is the beginning of wisdom, and the reading of the logs is understanding.

16. 16

    Verily I say unto you, blessed is the one who asketh what changed before he asketh who broke it; for the git log will answer the first, and the git blame will answer the second, and the answer shall be thee.

The Book of Job of the Sysadmin, Chapter 4:1–16.