Field Note #4 · The Sysadmin's Soliloquy

“After Shakespeare, before coffee…”

To patch, or not to patch—that is the query:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous zero-days,
Or to take arms against a sea of CVEs,
And by patching, end them?

To reboot—to sleep—
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to—’tis a Halting Problem
Devoutly to be wish’d.

To reboot—to sleep—
To sleep, perchance to crash—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of reboot what downtime may come,
When we have shuffled off this runtime load,
Must give us pause.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of irate users,
The ticket queue, the proud manager’s contumely,
The pangs of lost backups, the update’s delay,
The insolence of vendors, and the spurns
That patient merit of the clueless takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare shutdown -h -now?

Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary system load,
But that the dread of something after crash—
The undiscover’d kernel panic, from whose bourn
No system ever boots—puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to builds we know not of,
And push to prod on a Friday happy hour.

Thus ticketing does make cowards of us all,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
With this regard, their patches turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

Soft you now—
The help desk! Nymph, in thy tickets
Be all my sins remembered.

✶

On this day in 1932, James Chadwick announced the discovery of the neutron in the scientific journal Nature.

The neutron is electrically neutral. It does not draw attention the way protons and electrons do. But without it, atomic nuclei fly apart. It is the invisible binding force that makes stable matter possible.

Every organization has neutrons. They go by different names — sysadmin, network engineer, IT support, “the person who knows which cable to jiggle.” They carry no charge. They generate few headlines. But without them, everything flies apart.

If someone like that is in your life, consider forwarding this their way today with a simple “thanks.”

They’ll know what it means. They always do.

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