If you recompile kernels and you're running beta apps

Or you're checking files out of CVS and stuff like that

Or you understand most Perl scripts or you're scripting from the shell

Or you've read and can discuss the finer points of GPL.

If you've programmed in assembly or you write your apps in C

Or you have a preference: GTK or toolkits in Qt

You keep abreast of SCO Group's press or patched an app for free

You know who Alan Cox is, or you're running BSD

You suck up power every day computer's always on,

your system's maintenance is a breeze because you're running cron

Your IP masquerades and MAC addresses aren't live

Your surf the web without a name, except for on K5.

You actually like vi or emacs: either one

Your home DHCP is served by something made by SUN

When facing problem apps you simply sit and code a fix,

Or the network in your house is running IP version 6.

If your address range is class B cause you need a bigger range,

And what I wrote above is not in language you find strange

Perhaps the next bit won't be such a mystery to you

Because to most it won't make sense, but will to just a few.

While the packet switching networks switch the packets filling frames

And encoded MP3s were run from Konsole out through lame

Then the SCSI card whose terabyte array runs chrooted jails

Must juggle postfix tasks and never fail routing mail

If your firewall is representing public TCP

But your ports have all been monitored and blocked on 23

And your bytes are all encrypted and your private IP's safe

Cause you're mashing all your traffic through tunneled SSH.

Your hostnames have a naming scheme and printers aren't shared

And Snort reports activity that leaves you running scared

Your buffer overflows are caused by memory allocation

'Cause your Linux install still had holes at time of installation.

If your sendmail stops responding since you shut down your backdoor

Or Apache doesn't serve a page besides your 404

You find your resource hanged because you're running games through WINE

Then you're left with little option but to issue kill dash nine.

Sure, SQL queries fail at d-b console line

And your DVDs don't play because you can't configure xine

Your curly braces wrapping lines are off because you slipped

And somewhere there's semi-colon throwing off your script

When your daemons cause a kernel panic, forcing a reboot

Or your system logs report a process logging in as root

You can try to watch parameters that pass at time of boot

But you'll find you're pwned and have to phone a techie more astute

When you can't find all the man pages and not sure what to use

And you've googled all the answers that you got from Deja news

You can't remember switches of commands you try to pass

You should check O'Reilly books so you can finish all your tasks

A troll who flames your weblog thinks he's king of your domain

And his posts are mostly worthless and his comments all inane

Your admins check his IP but his netblock's AOL

Then your moderators have to deal with moderation hell.

If your RPMs are failing cause you're missing glibc

And you're sick of packed up tarballs cause they need dependancies

And the Gentoo nuts are preaching ebuilds, building all from source

You can always download yum or install apt-get there, of course.

If you're fsck'ing / each time you boot your Red Hat box anew

Cause you're still e-x-t-2 because you're running 6.2

It might be time to upgrade, we all know it's a chore

But you may have heard that recently there's kernel 2.4!

But just when you grow confident you've set the proper locks,

Your roommate gets a virus on his Windows ME box

While you fool with DOS command line tools like format backslash C:

You can map a drive to Samba so you backup his PC.

I've downed my Mandrake installation so I could go back

And check out all the latest Windows holes and worms and hacks

XP's Luna makes me dizzy though, and ActiveX is cruel

So I downed my XP install but I left the sucker dual.

Now no one should be expert here in every single way -

no matter what the AC posts on Slashdot have to say,

So even though we all keep up and keep to our "dot plan"