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The Bastard Operator from Hell (1999)
- newswasboring 2y agoWas suddenly reminded of this while trying to fix my laptop. Thought other people might also enjoy it on lazy Saturday afternoon.
- newswasboring 2y agoI'm on a real nostalgia trip today. Found that bash.org is down. But its available on the way back machine[1]. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20161023171257/http://www.bash.org/ http://web.archive.org/web/20161023171257/http://www.bash.or...
- mondobe 2y agoThere's also a static archive at [1]. It keeps the "Random" feature intact (although I wish it showed 20 or so quotes at a time like the original site, rather than just one) [1] https://bash-org-archive.com/ https://bash-org-archive.com/
- endgame 2y agoThere's also https://bash-org-archive.com/ https://bash-org-archive.com/
- h2odragon 2y agoTo whom it may concern, the TN state "BOFH" license plate should be available now. I've had it for 30 years, but i'm not able to drive anymore and the truck died, so I didn't renew it last month.
- jasoneckert 2y agoIf there is such a thing as passing the BOFH torch, this is it. I'm sure someone here will thank you for mentioning this!
- CoastalCoder 2y agoI respectfully disagree. This torch isn't passed, it's taken. Shortly after some off-label use of quicklime.
- h2odragon 2y agoHave you no swamps nearby? Recycling, and so on.
- CoastalCoder 2y ago> Have you no swamps nearby? Recycling, and so on. I smell "carbon offset fees" on the BOHF's invoices. Good thinking.
- gerdesj 2y agoHow did I miss your comment? I'd normally claim great minds think alike, but mine clearly isn't!
- gerdesj 2y agoTN: Tennessee. No mention of swamps on its wikipedia page. There are three bloody great major rivers mentioned and mountains, so I'm thinking hydro powered cattle prods, weights and a river. You should be able to sell a carbon credit or two on that basis.
- h2odragon 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reelfoot_Lake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reelfoot_Lake some of west tn is "false karst" highlands; we got ~10ac to ~1000ac patches of swamp all over. some of them have the fun floaty landscape bits that you can walk on, but not drive a tractor over. eats bulldozers with an amusing plonk sound.
- beng-nl 2y agoOff-Topic, but drove around for a few months in a TN state “PWNAGE” license plate for the few months I lived there to intern :-) I loved that plate, it looked cool in real life; and I kept it, it’s proudly hanging in my NL office now.
- devilbunny 2y agoIn about 1998, I was driving down the highway in Mississippi and saw a tag: "UID ZRO". I had a passenger at the time and said hey, I'm going to pass this guy, but tell me if he looks like a Unix admin. Passenger was familiar with the type and said yes, he did.
- esafak 2y agoBack when computer expertise was hard to come by, so admins could lord over users. The Internet has made these people extinct. SNL parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25J3u3P-HHg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25J3u3P-HHg
- h2odragon 2y agorelatable by all the unseen engineers whose job it is to keep the machines running, so that everybody else can do their jobs. especially so in the early days of computing, from whence the stories come; where "reliability" was a laugh
- josefx 2y agoMost users only bother with quick solutions for whatever problem they have, not with any deeper understanding. They get the kind of expertise where the BOFH only has to sit on the sidelines with a bucket of popcorn, watch the user shred their own system and offer a pristine replacement with all their local data gone. The amount of times I have seen users click past pages of apt install ouput after messing with the package sources has been well above zero.
- surfingdino 2y agoThey still lord over us, but ask ChatGPT to write Terraform for them.
- CRConrad 2y ago1) WTF, Jackie Chan was on SNL?!? Ya live and learn... 2) And they had -- remarkably current, today of all days -- pagers.
- fadesibert 2y agoBOFH is still a periodic fixture on TheRegister: https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/ https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/
- mondobe 2y agoI wish this was the top comment... I read through the whole archive on bjash multiple times before realizing new ones were still coming out regularly.
- theshaper 2y agoIn addition, the On Call section has just completed its 500th issue: https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/15/on_call_500_columns_celebration/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/15/on_call_500_columns_c...
- car 2y ago... where Ashlee Vance used to be a writer! I really loved his style back then and was quite pleased to see him becoming so successful [1-3]. [1] https://www.ashleevance.com https://www.ashleevance.com [2] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/01/space_economy_vance/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/01/space_economy_vance/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashlee_Vance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashlee_Vance
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Canada 2y agoClassic. Remember, the BOFH is no longer the "operator" of some systems at a university. Now he's your ISP, your search engine, your social media services, and many other important things you rely on. "Well, the answer is, we do nothing FOR users. We do things TO users. It's a fine distinction, but an important one all the same." https://www.chinet.com/html/bofh/lastbofh.html https://www.chinet.com/html/bofh/lastbofh.html
- GuB-42 2y agoThe situation has changed. There is less opportunities for the kind of evil the BOFH is known for. The operator used to be one guy doing stuff no one understand, maybe not a high salary, but a huge amount of individual power when it comes to computers. The situation is different now, computers are serious business, and the higher ups are keeping a close look, some of them even know a thing or two about computers. There are external audits, surveillance, and paperwork. It is much harder to wipe one guy's data just because he pissed you off and get away with it. Bureaucracy is the new evil. While the new BOFH can't easily wipe off your work anymore, he definitely can ask you to fill up a multi-page form of conflicting requirements in order to access a resource you need. That's the process you know.
- GauntletWizard 2y agoThe situation hasn't changed at all. There are tons of compliance auditors, and they can write all the policy they want, but they can't audit the day to day. When I was at Facebook, there was a very strict official policy and warning in Bootcamp that "The security team knows when you impersonate a user, and you will be fired if it's not for good reason". I still saw people impersonating their girlfriends, their ex girlfriends, their crushes; None of them got noticed or even fired, and there was tacit acknowledgement that it was widespread. This was the same company that encouraged people to install their root certificate so they could MITM your connections[1]. You need to be worried about both. There's probably more banal evil than there was, but it's not because the assholes with petty power have disappeared. All that said; The BOFH stories were never about the kind of evil you actually find in technical circles. There were juvenile power fantasy about being an evil trickster god; They were catharsis about all the times you are angry and frustrated at your coworkers; Yes, you want to hit them, shock them, throw them down the stairs - The same way that you wish you had a rocket launcher to blast the car ahead of you off the freeway. It's ridiculous power fantasy, and it's kind of shameful that tech has so many people that view it as "unhealthy" rather than crass for the sake of being crass; It is over the line twice. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/29/18202880/facebook-research-enterprise-root-certificate-onavo-techcrunch https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/29/18202880/facebook-researc...
- fmeyer 2y agoBOFH, BileBlog, The Daily WTF; No wonder we all turned cynical.
- bitwize 2y agoArtifacts of the toxic "contempt culture" historically endemic to hacker culture. https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture/ https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture/
- woooooo 2y ago"Contempt culture" is one way to put it, definitely had some toxic elements, but it was also actual hacker culture. The nice-ification of tech has come with corporatization and has its own downsides.
- maxbond 2y agoIt was a gatekeeping strategy. Opening the gates means opening them for the people you like and the people you don't. Ultimately, it's the hackerly thing to do. Knowledge wants to be free.
- lll-o-lll 2y agoStrategy? You think a bunch of people sat down and planned a specific set of rules to ensure only the “right sort” (cynical bastards), were allowed in the club? The BOFH “culture” was the IT admin culture (exaggerated for comic effect); more cynical than anyone because they had to deal with people. It’s probably still like this. IT (or IS as it seems to have been re-branded), sits as a “cost centre”, frequently at the end of a long line of sewage pipes, coping the blame for any number of other peoples mistakes. I suspect the prickly nature is a necessary survival trait. Cultures develop as they develop. There’s no conspiracy. They also evolve and change, and targeted interventions can push them in certain directions. “Hacker Culture” was never just one thing, and that’s never been more true than today. Certain “clubs” might have been more or less exclusionary at various times, but the scene as a whole has always been a welcoming one.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- spl757 2y agoI had BOFH as a vanity plate on my car and I never met one person that understood the reference outside of work. Yes I'm old. lol
- EvanAnderson 2y agoIt's probably the case that there are people who know the reference but are just seeing you in traffic. I saw "SIGKILL" a few years ago and smiled to myself but didn't have occasion to speak to the owner (driving at the time). I've had "31337" since '98 (also old) and had just a couple of people mention it to me.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoIf anyone wants to ROTFL, then this is a good place to start. I've been following Simon Travaglia since the 1980s. I don't know if he still has his old site up, but he also had a bunch of amusing views on Kiwi culture.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- smileson2 2y agonow we call them devops
- gerdesj 2y agosysops. devops are prey!
- gerdesj 2y ago... sorry, customers.
- erik_seaberg 2y agoBut the cloud is just some other BOFH's computer.
- Aeolun 2y agoEspecially when the cloud is AWS, GCP or Azure. Damn, that’s all of them.
- shagie 2y agoThere's OCI... the worst name for a cloud. https://www.oracle.com/cloud/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/ There's your own local cloud... ICP... the second worst name. https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cloud-private/3.2.x?topic=started-cloud-private-overview https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cloud-private/3.2.x?topic=starte... "For every retweet this gets, I will add an Uncomfortable @awscloud Truth to the thread." https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1173367909369802752.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1173367909369802752.html has a bit of snark for AWS and other clouds.
- surfingdino 2y agonot platform engineers?
- trollied 2y agoAlso, bofhcam https://bofhcam.org https://bofhcam.org
- fuzztester 2y agoAnother funny one is the Twitter account of that guy from Kazakhstan. I forget his name. oh yeah got it. @DEVOPS_BORAT. check him out. hilarious. last i checked, a while ago, he had stopped tweeting, but there are many previous tweets of his anyway, which should still be accessible. https://x.com/DEVOPS_BORAT https://x.com/DEVOPS_BORAT Edit: In the context of this current hn thread, this is a gem of a tweet from him: @DEVOPS_BORAT · Mar 30, 2011 Confuse of Dev or Ops? Simple rule: if you are praise for Web site success, you are Dev; if you are blame when Web site down, you are Ops. having been on both sides of the fence, I can resonate with that.
- fuzztester 2y agoanother: DevOps Borat @DEVOPS_BORAT · Feb 9, 2013 Conflict resolution is most important skill of manager. In startup we are force all manager for use git.
- shagie 2y ago> The wisdom of Devops Borat (RIP, may Taichi Ohno himself carry him into Valhalla!) condensed in fortune cookie format without any @ messages included. Just the goofiest random shit :) https://gist.github.com/textarcana/676ef78b2912d42dbf355a2f728a0ca1 https://gist.github.com/textarcana/676ef78b2912d42dbf355a2f7... Or... Get a random devops_borat or sadserver tweet in Obsidian - https://josh.fail/2023/get-a-random-devops-borat-or-sadserver-tweet-in-obsidian/ https://josh.fail/2023/get-a-random-devops-borat-or-sadserve... --- The original https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/ https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/ is up. The server that it points to is still running. Your excuse is: The ring needs another token
- baruchthescribe 2y agoIn Devops is turtle all the way down but at bottom is Perl script.
- d5ve 2y agoI had a run-in with the BOFH in real life many years ago as a university student where he was working. I'd messed up something network-related on a lab PC, and noticed that the NIC was now in promiscuous mode for some reason. I did a bit of idle poking around and pinged a few interesting hostnames I found. I was called into the the BOFH's office the next day and interrogated. He glared at me as I explained, and eventually let me off with a stern warning, though the PC was snatched from the lab before I made it back there and never seen again.
- beginnings 2y agoRichard Lewis coined 'the blank from hell'
- dang 2y agoRelated. Others? The Bastard Operator from Hell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37881524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37881524 - Oct 2023 (2 comments) The Bastard Operator from Hell (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29590667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29590667 - Dec 2021 (98 comments) The Bastard Operator From Hell (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21903668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21903668 - Dec 2019 (94 comments)
- peteforde 2y agoTo this day, I still occasionally imply that perhaps someone needs to power surge their drivers.
- russfink 2y agoThe BOFH is soon to be replaced by the BAIFH.
- rashidujang 2y agoLove it, this seems very similar to https://www.actsofgord.com/ https://www.actsofgord.com/
- codr7 2y agoLove it! Not because I would, or think anyone should, just because it's funny as hell.
- exabrial 2y ago“If that bothers you, don’t read it” Ah, refreshing.
- alpenbazi 2y agoThis made me joining systems administration back in the 90s
- berbec 2y agoThis got me a job because I told my now boss, after he described the dutys, "You're looking for a PFY". Been there 10 years.
- enneff 2y agoI remember finding this funny back in the 90s but it’s just kind of sad to me now. Today he just seems like a very unhappy, psychopathic character.
- enimodas 2y agoI expected to experience something similar, but on reading, it's so over the top that my brain has no problem realizing it's a joke. Violent movies on the other hand I can't really enjoy much anymore.
- SllX 2y agoSimon has since updated his website—a couple of different times I think?—but I only feel right reading the pre-El Reg archives the way I read them in 2007, which happily is still on the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20070811042222fw_/http://bofh.ntk.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070811042222fw_/http://bofh.nt... (Open an episode in a new tab/window to escape the IFRAME viewport.)
- Lev1a 2y agoStill have the three BOFH Omnibus volumes in my Kindle app, bought originally from Simon, who has since discontinued their sale on Amazon for some reason, IIRC Amazon fees/taxes/something like that which would actually lose him money from having it for sale there. I've reread all three volumes quite a few times over the years, currently on Volume I, year 2000 #24 again, since I mainly read a few stories every time I'm on my 30 minute (lunch) break at work. If Simon reads this, thank you for your work amusing your readers, me among them.
- rollcat 2y agoApologies for going further off topic, but > IIRC Amazon fees/taxes/something like that which would actually lose him money from having it for sale there. Holy hell, I've heard of Amazon effectively pocketing something like 45% off of each sale, but if true, this is next-level ridiculous. I avoid shopping there whenever I can, but I also live in a city of 2mil and still often won't find something particular locally. Is Amazon our era's BOFH?
- Lev1a 2y agoAh, found the reason [1]: > No more books. At one point I was selling the BOFH 'books' on Amazon, but it got to be a royal pain. Every month or so I'd get some warning about the book quality from Amazon that I'd have to address and every year I'd have to fill in a US tax form - not big annoyances, but annoying enough to make it not worth the time... Amazon still reminds me every 6 months or so, but there's no turning back now! So in my recollection I apparently mixed together the different parts: "having to periodically fill in US tax forms even though he's residing in NZ" and "annoyance not being worth his time". It apparently wasn't a direct tax/fee amount issue, but more one of annoyance and sales of these (e)books on Amazon probably not being substantial enough to offset that hassle. Sadly I can't edit my GP comment anymore to correct that. [1]: from http://www.bofharchive.com/ http://www.bofharchive.com/
- UncleSlacky 2y agoThe tales continue at El Reg: https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/ https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/
- photonthug 2y agoIf you like bofh and don’t know the ancient lore of tae the paramedic, you’ll enjoy reading it since it is similar in flavor. Probably a better archive somewhere besides Reddit, but this is another Usenet classic Https://www.reddit.com/r/ems/comments/1pnao9/the_collected_magical_world_of_tae_the_paramedic/
- daft_pink 2y agoWhenever I hear the word level 1 technician I think about waffle irons
- camgunz 2y agoWow does the BOFH kill the user in all of them. That's so dark lol