Read Only Friday is a practice that a number of IT departments in large organizations are adopting. It is the idea that on a Friday, no major changes (and in some cases includes minor changes) are made at all. This decreases the probability that anything will go wrong over the weekend and require the services of the on call admin.

This means that on Friday there is typically a full compliment of systems administrators who are sitting around at their desks with a limited supply of tasks they can work on. That tends to also mean that they are bored on the internal IRC channel, providing an increased dosage of humorous banter with each other, and with the developers who are tired and ready to check out for the week.

I decided to collect some of the more amusing samples, and have taken efforts to obscure names of people, servers and projects. In some cases they may not have come from that IRC channel, but from one of the many I frequent which are full of nerds.

As a final side note, most of these aren’t from Fridays. They have been gathered over several months and on various days of the week. (I never said sysadmins were ONLY funny on Fridays..)

<dev> syadmin, in my notes from our meeting yesterday, I have: ‘learn to use math, “averages”‘ do you have pointers on where I can look to read up on these topics?
<dev> maybe there’s like a seminar or conference on “averages” ?
<dev> 🙂
<dev> our training budget is running low but this sounds like an important skill

<syadmin1> smells like untrusted input and no validation. 🙂
<syadmin2> sure does. You can trust me, I’m a DBA
<dev> exactly. and he checked a checkbox that says something like “ONLY USE FOR TESTING. DO NOT USE IN PRODUCTION”
<dev> on a read-only friday

<sysadmin> I am a bearded lesbian with pitbulls?
<sysadmin> I had no idea…
<sysadmin> Whoa. that changes everything.

<syadmin1> dev1, dev2: I’m extending app database. You guys can fight about the bill
<syadmin1> syadmin2: ^^
<syadmin2> no
<syadmin2> they can clean up their storage first. too many 1’s and 0’s being wasted there. 🙂
<syadmin1> okay
<syadmin1> yeah, why are they storing the zeros AND the ones?
<syadmin2> no clue
<syadmin1> it seems like a lack of a 1 is good enough to indicate a 0
<dev3> the zeros shouldn’t even take up any space
<dev3> it’s 0
<me> perhaps you need to balance your data better then, too many 1s and not enough 0s?
<syadmin1> it seems like you could make a map
<syadmin1> where you let X = 0 and Y = 1, and then substitute them
<syadmin1> like a hash map
<syadmin1> would save a ton of space

<dev> really?
<dev> lt, pgt, st, tgt? those are the names of your tables?
<dev> sheesh
<syadmin> can someone hack together a simple keepalive please?
<dev> well we’d have to call it a application_kt in this app, it seems, syadmin
<dev> since THEY DON’T USE ENGLISH in this app

<syadmin> dev1: how’s AWS involved? : )
<dev1> it’s hosting the media server
<syadmin> interesting
<syadminboss> dev1 on who’s AWS account?
<dev2> yours syadminboss
<dev2> 🙂
<dev2> $’s are ticking
<syadminboss> I don’t have a AWS account 🙂
<dev2> keep right on thinking that
<dev2> until the credit card bill shows up 🙂

<syadmin> interesting .. There is no memory ballooning on devenv01, vmware tools is fresh and good, stopping tools doesn’t cause load to fall…
<syadmin> certainly chewing the megagizzles cpu-wise on vcenter

<syadmin> I’m going to be taking that down and restoring from backup here shortly
<dev> someone go flip that breaker again 😉

<dev> umm xeon E5645 how does it sound?
<dev> syadmin: ^ ?
<syadmin> probably clicks a lot
<syadmin> maybe some whirring
<syadmin> I have to expect that all of those transistors closing and opening as fast as they do probably sounds a lot a rainstorm. So I’m going with rainstorm.

<dev1> sysadmin: I don’t think so. It’s just looking at one xml file and building a huge number of ruby objects from it
<dev2> and by 1 xml file you mean 21 megs of text
<sysadmin> dev1: I don’t really see a lot of CPU burn on that box
<sysadmin> unless you’re single threaded.. ?
<dev1> yes, single threaded
<syadmin> what?!
<sysadmin> you come to me on this day, the day of my daughter’s wedding, and ask me to give you more processor time on 4-core box for your single-threaded application?!
<dev1> But Don, you have no idea how hard it is to work with this Global Interpreter Locks

<sysadmin> wow..what’s stored in that?
<dev1> logged in user details
<dev2> shouldnt it just be a few details though? the manager id and the user id?
<dev2> sounds like its the entire manager object and user object
<analyst> dev2: it’s bigger, looks like 10MB per row
<sysadmin> also their pictures and an Mp3 of them saying “Hello”
<dev2> haha