Looking for books where the protagonist is just a competent sysadmin

Sysadmin protagonists in fiction are almost always Hollywood-ified nonsense. "I'll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic to track the killer's IP." For what it's worth, that's not how any of this works.

Actual request: looking for books where the protagonist does *real* sysadmin work. Configuring BIND. Fighting email deliverability issues. Patching at 3am. Explaining to management why you can't just "add more servers" to fix a database deadlock. The boring, competent stuff.

I've read:
- "The Phoenix Project" — DevOps, not pure sysadmin, and too management-focused
- "Daemon" — fun, but more hacker thriller than day-to-day ops
- various short stories in Strange Horizons, one good one about a tape library

Genre doesn't matter. SF, mundane fiction, even romance if the love interest is a ZFS pool. Just want competence porn, not magic.

Any recs?

Idk why I do this but I once wrote a 20k word fanfic where the plot was just someone migrating a mail server from sendmail to postfix

Anyway theres this obscure blog, guy serializes his actual oncall weeks. Fiction tag but basically autobiography. 3am page, disk full on log server, turns out cron job writing to wrong path since 2019. No explosions. Just `lsof | grep deleted` and a sigh.

Cant remember url. Hosted on some tilde server. Maybe someone else knows

I read book last year, title « The Last Firewall » maybe?? No wait, that has AI war. Not sysadmin.

Made VPS last month for friend, he asked « is like book? » I said no sir, is just installing packages and waiting.

Found one suggestion: « Constellation Games » by Leonard Richardson. Has sysadmin character on alien archaeology project. Does actual ssh, actual server problems. Not main protagonist tho sir. Still maybe helpful??

Also short story « STET » by Sarah Gailey. Has some technical accuracy in publishing platform. Not exactly sysadmin but close to infrastructure sir.

Will keep looking, thank you very much sir

Deal: no fiction needed. Read actual postmortems. Free. Google SRE book, $0 if you know where to look. Steal of knowledge.

SRE book has real stories. Disk full. Cascade failure. Oncall rotation. No plot armor. Best sysadmin protagonist is yourself at 3am.

Suspicious of free trials but postmortems are always free. Best deal per-GB of learning.