Twenty Years, Zero Downtime (That Anyone Found Out About)

Hi, I’m Ashton. For the last twenty years I’ve been the person standing between “everything’s running fine” and the smoking crater where the file server used to be. The title on my badge kept changing — sysadmin, IT Operations Manager, Director of Compute — but the actual job never did: keep the lights on, keep the bad guys out, and keep the pager quiet long enough to finish a cup of chai tea.

This is where I write it all down. The hard-won lessons, the 3 AM disasters, the postmortems that started with “so, funny story,” and yes, the outages I caused myself. (Every honest engineer has at least one. If you say you don’t, you’re either fibbing or you haven’t been here long enough yet.) Two decades in, I’ve learned that the best lessons in this field rarely come from the documentation. They come from the moment right after everything breaks.

I keep the specifics deliberately vague - no employer names, no “as permitted by my NDA” footnotes — because the stories aren’t really about any one company. They’re about the work. Whether you’re a junior admin still learning which directory not to delete, a battle-tested engineer who appreciates a good outage story, or a manager trying to figure out why your IT team keeps saying “it’s complicated,” there’s something here for you.

Pull up a chair. The tea’s cold, the war stories are true, and nobody’s getting paged. Probably.

— Ashton