The Nerdy Side of a Breakup

Posted on January 26, 2007
Filed Under comics | 4 Comments

XKCD has a melancholy cartoon about the sysadmin side of a breakup. Ahh, the price of love amongst nerds.

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    • Comments

    4 Responses to “The Nerdy Side of a Breakup”

    1. Ken Nelson on January 27th, 2007 6:50 pm

      Real sysadmins would have directly edited /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow. Unless, of course, the SO existed on multiple systems. Then, we’re talking about a little script wrapper that executes “ssh root@$(host} userdel megan”. I suppose one could execute a little sed command to directly edit the files over the ssh connection, but that’s a sharp axe to wield.

      -k-

    2. dave on January 27th, 2007 7:14 pm

      Ken, I know this is what you do for a living and all but this is kind of a buzz kill comment. Would that really have worked in a cartoon?

      Of course, we are spending Saturday night leaving comments on a blog so there’s a meta-nerdiness at play.

    3. Ken Nelson on January 28th, 2007 10:52 am

      Actually, the cartoon was a riot as it was. vi isn’t particularly humorous.
      If the affair is really over, the use of the -r and -f options to userdel would have underscored the finality. Extreme prejudice mode, and all that.

      -k-

    4. PJ Cabrera on January 30th, 2007 1:51 am

      Ken, a real sysadmin with several systems would have known to use PAM with LDAP, instead of maintaining multiple users in multiple systems. :-)

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