sysadmin Memes

Oh, just a casual Tuesday in the server room where someone decided to create a modern art installation titled "Ethernet Cable Massacre." Look at those poor RJ45 connectors just... existing in their half-crimped, wire-exposed glory, scattered around like the aftermath of a networking battlefield. Someone clearly had ONE job—crimp these cables properly—and instead chose violence. The MikroTik Cloud Router Switch sitting there all pristine and professional while surrounded by this absolute chaos of exposed twisted pairs is sending me. It's giving "I showed up to a black-tie event and everyone else came in pajamas" energy. Pro tip: This is what happens when you let the intern handle cable management after watching one YouTube tutorial at 2x speed. Those wires are more exposed than my code on GitHub, and just as embarrassing.

Someone finally said it. DNS is apparently a scam perpetuated by Big Nameserver to sell more resolvers. Servers were perfectly happy being identified by raw IP addresses until sysadmins got greedy and demanded "respect" in the form of complex distributed systems that nobody understands. The argument here is that we had hosts.txt—a single file that every computer could use to map names to IPs. Simple. Elegant. Completely unscalable. But who needs the internet to grow anyway? Instead, sysadmins convinced everyone we needed this elaborate DNS infrastructure with recursive queries, authoritative nameservers, TTLs, and zone files. Now when someone asks for example.com, you get a 17-step journey through multiple servers just to return an IP address. They've been laughing at us this whole time while we troubleshoot NXDOMAIN errors at 3 AM. The three diagrams with increasing question marks perfectly sum up every developer's understanding of DNS: "I think I get it... wait, what?... I have no idea what's happening anymore."

BGP peering being described as something "even friends can do" is the networking equivalent of saying "even friends can perform open-heart surgery together." Sure, technically possible, but someone's definitely getting hurt. For the uninitiated: BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is how the entire internet routes traffic between autonomous systems. It's the protocol that literally holds the internet together, and misconfiguring it can take down chunks of the web (looking at you, Facebook 2021 outage). Setting up BGP peering between networks requires trust, technical competency, and usually involves at least three conference calls where nobody's mic works properly. The idea that you'd casually BGP peer with your buddy like you're sharing Netflix passwords is both adorable and terrifying. "Hey bro, wanna exchange routing tables?" is not normal friend behavior. That's enterprise-level commitment right there.