Once upon a time there lived a Sysadmin. He started as a sysadmin at a tiny company, and soon decided he liked the work, and would need to find a larger place with more sysadmins like himself, in order to hone his craft. He found such a place, a search company with a nice Vista. He worked at the search company with many other sysadmins, sometimes leading a small group, and usually finding work that was fun, challenging, and interesting. He stayed there and flourished with his fellows for several years.

Then there came a time when the search engine was taken over by another company, and the sysadmin and his fellows had to scatter to the four winds to find new places. The sysadmin found a new home at a graphics equipment company, where he was part of a much smaller band of sysadmins, but found many new friends and took care of servers scattered from sunny California to snowy Wisconsin.

After a time, many of his new friends left and the sysadmin found himself doing less interesting, less challenging work, so he looked for a new challenge. He found one, in a City of Redwood. He and his small band took care of people’s photographs, moving them from server to server and making backups for the dwarves of Iron Mountain to carry away twice per week. He invented many new tools and worked with many cool and interesting people.

Alas, there again came a time when the cool and interesting people mostly had left and the challenge was not as interesting. Over time, the long road became longer. When he discovered he was spending more time defending his small band against silly politics than doing his interesting work, he decided to face the Monster again and seek a new refuge.

He found a new place, over the hill where the weird people lived, which promised to be a new challenge with cool, interesting people. Though it was small, the new place definitely had cool, interesting people, many of whom were just as weird as the sysadmin himself. He set himself to the task of taking care of servers, but unfortunately, there were too few servers, and most of the work involved taking care of user machines, which would sit on desks and never talk to the real customers at all. The people were wonderful and kind, but the work was both endless and unchallenging.

So, in order to continue his great journey started some 12 years before, the sysadmin decided to seek yet another Interesting Challenge. Where might it be found? The end of the story is not yet written, but hopefully he will find more kindred souls, a medium- to large-scale production environment, lots of interesting automation and tools development, and no desktop machines. We shall see!