So *that's* what's going on

Sometimes random bits of my personality make themselves clear to me. Example: today, a good part of my day was spent trying to figure out exactly what a particular server did. I knew it ran a program, and what the program was called, but that was it; it had been shut down and sent over to me for installation in $WORK's server room. I had to:

• reset the password
• get access to the ILOM
• change pam.d/* (authconfig! didn't know about that!)
• start the service
• figure out the licensing
• track down why it wasn't starting at boot time

All of which reminded me of a quote from the biography of Isaac Newton right now (which I can't track down, worse luck)...something about how, without understanding, someone whose tools break will be unable to figure out what's wrong. Much more succinct than that in the original. And that, in turn, reminded me of something I saw on a mailing list recently (or a website, or...) about how a sysadmin is someone who asks why something works, not just how to make it so.

Example: I came across this article, shortly after "Aurora Attack -- Resistance Is Futile, Pretty Much" on the howling void, and that made me realize that I'd been thinking in the panicky sort of way outlined. And that reminded me of the time I learned about The Rapture as a kid and went home and told everyone about it. I was told something, it was compelling, and I took it in wholesale, like snorting cocaine, and ran to tell everyone about it. And that made me realize that I've done no checking at all on that Wired article, none, but it's compelling and here I am telling everyone about it.

And I was relating this all to my wife and she said yeah, you dive in, but it's a process. You spent the next n years of your life learning about American fundamentalist Christianity and Bible history and you didn't just hide under the bed scared forever.

Random note: Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel just got scarier. (It's a process, remember?)

'Nother random note: Glad to see Planet Sysadmin is back up; I missed it.