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I’m fighting with the Kickstarter web interface to fulfill the Run Your Own Mail Server campaign and trying to get Dear Abyss ready for launch, so here’s a chunk of an advice column.

All three regular readers of this column appear to be drawn by the pleasure of watching my childish behavior when confronted with the tedious duty of writing said column. While “you insulted me in the first three words of your greeting” is a feeble justification for breaking into your systems and converting them to global-warming-accelerating SkunkCoin miners, I’m willing to make it work.

Because that’s what’s sysadmins do. We make things work.

Even bad things.

Software vendors insist on developing new bad things and cramming them down gullets already obscenely bloated with horrendous badness. Systems administrators stagger through the endless hours of their brief years struggling to live beneath tremendous loads of badness smelted from software like arsenic from arsenopyrite. The inherent insecurity of absolutely everything enhances this burden like a beached, deceased whale enhances an oil spill.

The urge to retreat into malaise is a natural human reaction.

Sysadmins lack the luxury of being human.

The prelaunch page for the next Letters collection, Dear Abyss, is up at Kickstarter.

I’m mostly resting this week because I’m taking vacation after BSDCan and the Kickstarter of WTF. Not sure which was more exhausting. The new Steampunk Fantasy Storybundle just launched, though, and it includes my Prohibition Orcs novel Frozen Talons, so here’s a sweet little old lady forging a weapon out of her dead husband’s bones.

The grooms’ quarters was too cramped for bone-melding, but Mha made it work. Bone-melding should be done beneath the open sky. It should be done at a roaring fire built up from entire trees torn from the soil and the bones of slain enemies, witnessed by the clan. She had a tiny stove heated until it gleamed in her night-sight even through the sunlight drifting through the high narrow windows.

And all the orcs she knew witnessed from gleaming eye sockets.

She had feared she had forgotten the rites, but her ragged voice recalled the words and her age-bent hands remembered the motions, the gestures, the twist of bone against bone until they caught one another and bound harder than iron. The comforting smells of scorched bone and burned blood and viscous sweat filled the air.

That orc’s thighbones were not long enough, so she added the shin bones. The smaller calf bones went on the side, to give the shaft a sharper shape so her feeble hands wouldn’t slip. Not that a properly bone-melded shaft could slip in its maker’s grip. The kneecaps, worn to smoothness by decades of joyful life, nestled together perfectly on the bottom as a base.

The Storybundle’s a heck of a deal, and gets you great books by a whole bunch of good authors. And my book.

My next book will be Dear Abyss: The FreeBSD Journal Letters Column, Years 1-6. Seeing as each column was written in a one hour burst of bile, I’m going through them and polishing off the missed opportunities for rage.

The annoying thing about asymptomatic system failures is that they’re asymptomatic—but no less real than the kind with noticeable symptoms. Some user makes a call, an actual voice call where they’re spewing random words in some language from their food-hole and you’re expected to parse that babble with your ears, when even Hollywood knows that sysadmins are artisanally optimized to receive information via their eyes and extrude alloyed sarcasm and results from their keyboard-callused fingertips. Any one of these users can at any time disrupt the meticulously assembled hallucination of whatever problem you’re working on and demand that you turn your three pounds of skull-pudding to the fact that their web browser jittered, actually jittered, when they played a cat video off the fileserver or they got a “File not found” error when they know darn well that they saved their proposal under that name just last night on their son’s computer.

Kickstarter has the prelaunch page up. I’m afraid that the ridiculous success of the mail book there has trained me to launch absolutely everything through Kickstarter. Even the stupid things. I expect this to do much less well but hey, those nickels spend.

Here’s a snippet of the next Letters column for the FreeBSD Journal.

We’ve all seen the propaganda on configuration management. Deploy dedicated-purpose, highly tuned servers with a single command! Adjust computation clouds with a simple playbook! Seamlessly and transparently migrate from server to server! Containers! That’s fine for people starting from a green field in the last few years, but most system administrators work in environments best described as “baroque” if not “antediluvian.” I find myself with a green field only when I myself raze the earth and wait for the clover to grow. Not grass. Lawns are a climate atrocity. Unless you own sheep. Or goats, but if you own any kind of goat you won’t have a lawn for long, which demonstrates that any force for good is also an agent of desertification. Besides, who wants to wait for clover before installing a datacenter? Build in the ruins of that razed kindergarten and get on with your work.

I wonder if anyone noticed I missed last week?