This is airlifted directly from a post by ‘Szechuan Death’ at the Scary Devil Monastery. I didn’t touch a iota, but I found it extremely insightful. If the original author feels it is inappropriate to display his content here, I’ll gladly remove it. I thought it was something worth to be preserved beyond Usenet archives.
The basic rules of systems administration – agnostic of platform, era,
personal preference, management diktat, whatever – are three, eternal,
and easy to articulate:Rule #1 (Principle of Least Intervention):
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fsck with it.”
[An oldie but a goodie, well known by nearly everyone who's ever played
with a comple system. From this springs several corollaries, my
favorite being 'Developers are tools of the Devil.']Rule #2 (Principle of Escape):
“If you *have* to fsck with it, have a plan to roll back whatever
changes you’ve made.”[First recorded in the year 20 B.I. (Before Internet), by the first
sysadmin to ever botch a change on a production system, Harassus Maximus
the Eternal Catamite, verbalized only moments before he was swallowed by
a demon dispatched from the bowels of the nether to punish his
accidental folly.]Rule #3 (Principle of the Panic Button):
“If you cannot roll back the changes you made, be damned sure you have
some way to restore service as soon as practically possible.”[This chestnut was first uttered by Hero Bastardus the Elder, as an
admonition to a PFY, shortly before the PFY was executed by Hero for the
sin of finger-fscking a production system into a terminally crashed
state without any coherently-verbalized plan for unfscking it or
mitigating the outage.]Yet these Articles of the Faith are routinely ignored, by clueless
management; by mouthbreathing submorons who should never have been let
near a keyboard, much less given root access; by perpetual spastics who
know these things in an academic sense, but somehow manage to routinely
lose control of their sphincters at precisely the correct time to cause
a fsckup of epic proportions; by users. Oh, God, the users. They
demand ponies, and demand them *now*, the hell with the havoc it will
wreak on the machines and on the hard-won stability achieved over
man-eons of effort prying bugs and strange failure modes from the
systems. And the PHBs, who perpetrate such insanities as attempting to
force practitioners of the Art into eternal Follies such as “democratic
design” (usually ignoring Rules #1 and #2) and craptastic Kool-Aid fads
like “agile development methods” (destroying all Rules in a pyre of
brilliantly iridescent stupidity).Yet have heart, O ye my brethren; the Rules are eternal, and Wankery is
ever-passing. It returns, yes, and frequently, like a maladaptive
evolutionary trait recurring at random intervals on the theory that
‘Hey, maybe *this* time it will work’; but never does it triumph, not in
the long run.(This is a good thing to believe, because otherwise one winds up curled
in a ball beneath one’s desk, the tears and gibbering flowing freely
until the men with needles come to carry you off to the Wacky Factory
for a vacation.)Apropos of nothing, of course, this fine Monday evening. Nothing
a’tall. Just another swell day in Paradise, yessir.