From the Department of Coffee-Fueled Shell Scripting and Low-Level Bit Wrangling

So, you want to be a Linux Systems Administrator?

Buckle up. Because unless you were chiseled out of Bash scripts and raised by daemons in an initrd, you’re probably doing it all wrong. But don’t worry — so are we.

Let’s take a walk down the directory tree of delusion, misused tools, bad habits that somehow still work, and the ever-widening chasm between grizzled veterans and the fresh-faced DevOps acolytes who think YAML is a programming language.

The Sacred Rituals We Do Without Thinking

Let’s get something straight:

I don’t use nmcli, I use ifconfig.
Yes, it’s deprecated. No, I don’t care.

I can type ifconfig eth0 up faster than your systemd-anointed soul can say “NetworkManager.” Sure, it might not even be installed anymore, but guess what — I carry a USB stick with static binaries and a copy of Slackware 9 just in case.

I still edit /etc/resolv.conf directly. Fight me.

Need to test connectivity? I don’t reach for curl, I telnet to port 22 like it’s still 2004.
Is it insecure? Yes.
Is it effective? Also yes.

Need to debug a binary? I use:

strings binary | less
strace? Only if strings fails. Which is basically never.

Tools I Know Are Wrong, but Still Use Religiously

These are my battle-worn favorites. Are they deprecated, outdated, or frowned upon? Absolutely. But they work, and my fingers type them automatically:

• netstat -tulnp — yes, ss is the future. No, I will not change.
• service and chkconfig — because I don’t need your new-fangled systemctl syntax.
• rsync with 14 flags I don’t fully remember — I copy-paste from rsync_magic.sh, and it has never failed me.
• Custom Bash scripts with zero error checking — they’re duct tape and prayers, but they’ve outlasted multiple CIOs.

Why New Users Think We’re Gatekeeping

Newcomers show up with shiny laptops, Pop!_OS installs, and wide-eyed dreams of contributing to “open source.” Meanwhile, we’re over here debugging an ancient SAN device with drivers last updated during the Bush administration.

They ask, “Which log should I check?”
We respond, “All of them.”

• /var/log/messages
• /var/log/syslog
• /var/log/dmesg
• /dev/ttyS0 if you’re feeling brave

They ask why nothing is in JSON.
We ask why their resume says “Kubernetes” but they don’t know what /etc/fstab does.

This isn’t elitism. This is survival.

The Elitist Echo Chamber We Accidentally Built

Let’s admit it: we did this.

• We made IRC hostile.
• We made mailing lists unreadable.
• We made Stack Overflow sarcastic enough to trigger PTSD.

We treat man pages like sacred texts. But let’s be honest: they’re often written in passive-aggressive robot English.

Now we’re stuck with a reputation as either:

1. Dinosaurs — clinging to scripts and tools no one understands anymore
2. Gatekeepers — scaring off people who might otherwise bring real innovation

Meanwhile, companies can’t find Linux talent, new users are afraid to ask questions, and old sysadmins are just trying to get udev to behave.

The “Right Way” vs. The “Way That Works”

Yes, Ansible is neat. Yes, containers are cool. Yes, systemd is here to stay.

But when the server’s down and your pager is going off at 2:00 AM?

I’m SSH’ing in and doing it live.

This isn’t nostalgia. This is muscle memory, forged in the fires of:

• midnight outages
• corrupted ext3 partitions
• and the arcane rituals of sendmail.mc

So What Now?

We need a truce.

Veterans:
Stop judging new users for not memorizing the Unix Philosophy. Let them stumble — we did too.

Newbies:
Respect the grizzled sysadmins. They built the infrastructure you’re now layering abstraction on top of. Learn why they do what they do, even if you don’t copy it.

And please…

If someone gives you a Bash one-liner that fixes your problem, maybe don’t ask,
“Is there a GUI for this?”

Final Thoughts from the Command Line

Being a Linux sysadmin isn’t about perfection. It’s about making it work when nothing else will. And maybe documenting it — but probably not.

So whether you’re grepping logs like a caveman or deploying containerized microservices from a GitHub Action triggered by a Slack bot: we’re all just trying to survive the next outage.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an NFS issue to fix by yelling at rpcbind like it owes me money.

Written by a Linux Admin with 30 Years of Mismatched Socks, Shell Scripts, and Strong Opinions.