Seasons upon us: Volume 2

Originally posted: 12 December 2019

Last year I re-wrote a few classic Christmas Carols for everyone to enjoy.  And looks like I've done it again.

The night before Crashmas

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the site,

Not a pixel was stirring, not even a byte,

The modules were patched on the server with care,

In the hopes that Dries soon would be there,

The developers were nestled all snug in their beds,

While visions of pull requests danced in their heads,

DevOps in his Fedora and I in my cap,

Had just settled down for a long winter's nap,

When out on the error log there arose such a warning,

I sprang from my chair with a look of scorning,

Away to the terminal I flew with a flash,

Tore open the log files and threw up the cache,

The light from the router gave the room a green glow,

An errie tinge to the keyboard below,

When what to my bleary eyes should I read,

But a DDOS attack, the thing I most feared,

With little old drivers so broken and and krick,

Well I knew in a moment, it must be CRASH_Nick,

More rapid than BigPipe, the packets in pain,

And it whistled as it printed and called me a name,

"You silly little Admin all snug in your chair,

You have an unpatched dependency, were you even aware!

I will use this small crack to crash down your site,

And you will wish you had patched it last night!"

And then a beep, has a notification appeared,

Before my eyes my Christmas leave disappeared,

My face in my hands as I was turned and bowed,

Out the server came Dries, from the cloud,

He spoke not a word but went straight to his work,

And patched all the software, didn't call me a jerk,

With a click of the mouse and a tap of the keys,

He flew back into the server quick as you please,

His visage displayed on my screen, charged no commission,

But then faded away like a CSS opacity transition,

But I heard him exclaim as he uploaded out of sight,

"Patch your damn websites and have a good night!"