9 fortunes for system administrators

Good luck: It's something we all could use a little more of as our systems yawn and hiccup, our users grow ornery, and our codebases twist themselves into bigger knots.

At the Linux terminal, the fortune command might shed a little light on your day, whether piped into cowsay or displayed as a message of the day.

If you don't have fortune, on a Red Hat system, you can install the package fortune-mod (it's in EPEL and the default Fedora repos). 

I actually use my fortune command every once in a while, often when I need a string of dummy test to try out a string of commands or a weird regular expression. In doing so, I've started a little collection of my favorite few that might apply to sysadmins. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. How many Unix hacks does it take to change a light bulb?
   Let's see, can you use a shell script for that or does it need a C program?

2. If it weren't for the last minute, nothing would ever get done.

3. The whole history of computers is rampant with cheerleading at best and bigotry at worst.
                -- Larry Wall in <199702111730.JAA28598@wall.org>

4. "How should I know if it works?  That's what beta testers are for.  I only coded it."
   (Attributed to Linus Torvalds, somewhere in a posting)

5. "I would rather spend 10 hours reading someone else's source code than 10 minutes listening to Musak waiting for technical support which isn't."
   (By Dr. Greg Wettstein, Roger Maris Cancer Center)

6. The easiest way to get the root password is to become system admin.
           -- Unknown source

7. The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
           -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum

8.  Make it idiot-proof, and someone will breed a better idiot.
           -- Oliver Elphick

9. I am a computer. I am dumber than any human and smarter than any administrator.