catmistake's Journal: The Admin and the Engineer

The Sun compiling gcc,
Compiling terabyte:
He did his very best to make.
The errors few; It's right!
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.

The monitor flashed sulkily,
Because she thought the Sun
Had got no buses to be there
After the user done--
"It's very rude of him," she said,
"To bug and spool perlfunc!"

Shell C was net as net could be,
Silicon tty.
You could not trace a route, because
No route was in vi:
No cron was running overhead--
No daily cron to try.

The Admin and the Engineer
Were coding fast a hack;
They script like anything in C
With quotaoff the stack:
"This is a mirrored RAID array,
Bring on the DoS attack!"

"If seven aids with seven flops
greped it a MIPSyear for,
Do you suppose," the Admin said,
"That they could grep it, sure?"
"I doubt it," said the Engineer,
And ssh-ed as toor.

"O Users, come and twalk with us!"
The Admin sent in batch.
"A pleasant twalk, an appletalk,
perhaps in tiny ash:
We cannot do with more than four,
To give OS a patch."

The eldest user fingered him,
Not a keystroke he'd waste:
The eldest user's cursor blinked,
left not a single trace--
Meaning to say he did not choose
To leave the user space.

But four new users hurried up,
All eager, flagged edges:
Their notes were rushed, logins secure,
Their codes clean, just pledges --
And this was odd, because, you know,
They had no privileges.

Four other users followed them,
And yet another, well;
And thick and fast they came at last,
And more, and more, to tell--
All pinging through the matrixes,
And scrambling in the shell.

The Admin and the Engineer
twalked on a while, its true,
And then they halted on a fsck
Convenient du:
And all the online users stopped
And waited in the queue.

'The time has come,' the Admin said,
'To talk of many things:
Of su's - and chips - and classic Macs -
Of NuBus cards - and strings -
And why the source, compiling not -
And whether sigs have meanings.'

"But sticky bit," the users cried,
"Before we have our chat;
For some are out of memory,
And all binaries fat!"
"No proxies!" said the Engineer.
symlinked his files for that.

"upload the thread," the Admin said,
"Its what we chiefly need:
sushi and RAIDed disk besides
Are very good indeed--
Now if you're ready, users peer,
We can begin the feed."

"But not to us!" the users cried,
"the screen of death is blue!
Desktop support! That would be
A trolling thing to do!"
"The site is fine," the Admin said.
"Do you admin here too?"

"It was so kind of you to code
drivers for the device!"
The Engineer said nothing but
"RAID us another slice:
I wish you were not quite so df--
I had port-scanned you twice!"

"It seems a shame," the Admin said,
"To launch them a postkick,
After we've brought them out so far,
And made them groff so quick!"
The Engineer said nothing but
"The sputter's thread hdik!"

"Threads sleep for you," the Admin said:
"thoroughly optimized."
With jobs su-ed he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket admin guide
Before streaming UIs.

"O users," said the Engineer,
"You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we now cd home again?'
But answer came there none--
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd deleted every one.

--
adapted from Lewis Carroll