Unofficial Laws of JEE Systems Administration

For any budding web applications systems administrator, here is my tongue-and-cheek list of laws and axioms you will discover over the course of your careers to be self-evident.

1. The JVM never crashes unless you have dinner plans.
2. It's always the database.
3. Except when it's the network.
4. Logging in XML means your developers hate you.
5. Base HREFs in a web page are the entry to a support abyss.
6. You will be befriended by a web developer who doesn't know how DNS, SSL, or HTTP works.

And here are some relevant to systems administration in general:

1. State of the Art is a euphemism for 'Difficult to Support'.
2. A Data Center Migration is a form of Abstinence.
3. The load-balancer gets 100% of the blame while only being responsible for 2% of issues.
4. If you have specialists on a team of systems engineers, their specialty always fails when they are on vacation.  Always.
5. PCI Compliance is a Paradox
6. Next quarter, you will not be PCI Compliant

Comments

[Esther]

this is extremely funny. I agree on the abstinence and the blame game