The Book of Job of the Sysadmin · Chapter 7

The Restoration of the Sysadmin

1. 1

   And it came to pass, after the sysadmin had borne the pager through the long nights of the disk that was full and the long nights of the disk that was full again, that the Voice spoke out of the server room, saying: Thou hast kept my watch faithfully. Behold, the rotation is lifted from thee.

   See also Job 4:1

2. 2

   And the sysadmin lifted up his eyes, and the phone lay silent upon the nightstand, and he did not sleep, for the silence was strange unto him.

3. 3

   For in the days of his trial the phone had buzzed at every hour, and he knew each alert as a shepherd knoweth the bleating of his flock. Now there was no bleating, and he could not tell whether the flock was fed or had walked off the cliff.

4. 4

   And the Voice said unto him: Give thy runbooks unto the youngest of the new engineers, who has never yet been paged at three in the morning, that she may learn what thou hast learned in sleepless nights.

5. 5

   And the sysadmin wrote the runbooks, four hundred pages of them, and half of the steps said: ask the one who left in the third year, and the other half said: restart the thing.

   See also Psalms 28:9 · Prophets 5:13

6. 6

   And the junior engineer read them by the light of her screen, and she came unto him and said: Master, which thing? And he answered: The one that was there before us. Nobody remembereth.

7. 7

   Then the Voice granted unto him a budget for monitoring. And he rejoiced, and bought the graphs and the dashboards and the alerts upon alerts, and he set the Watchdog, which is an alert that fires always, so that when it falls silent, the Engineers know that the monitoring itself has died.

   See also Sutra 2:11

8. 8

   And he set a dead man's switch upon the system, as the old locomotives required the driver to hold a handle, lest the train run on without a driver.

9. 9

   And one night the pager did not buzz, and the sysadmin woke in terror, for the silence was louder than any alarm that had ever sounded in his house.

   See also Circuit 56:9

10. 10

    He went down into the server room to see, and the lights blinked green, and the fans hummed their old hymn, and nothing was on fire. And he said: Is all well? And the Voice answered: Silence is not health. Silence is only the sound of a thing that no longer speaks.

    See also Prophets 19:1

11. 11

    Then the sysadmin remembered the years of the alarms, when he had cursed every one of them, and he understood that each alarm was a voice of love, and that the quiet is the one thing no dashboard can show, for it is the event that never reports.

    See also Psalms 16:6 · Chronicles 17:3

12. 12

    And as the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before, so the Voice gave the sysadmin twice as many pagers, and all of them were silent, and he was more afraid than ever.

13. 13

    And the brethren came and ate bread with him, the managers who had never read a postmortem, and each gave him a piece of money and a ring of gold, which is to say, a budget line and a ticket marked low priority.

    See also Deployer 5:12 · Genesis 35:3

14. 14

    Verily I say unto you: blessed is the one who alerts upon the absence of the alert, for the Machine falls quietest on the day it is most needed.

    See also Job 6:16

15. 15

    Put a heartbeat on the heartbeat, and let the silence itself be a page.

The Book of Job of the Sysadmin, Chapter 7:1–15.