Slashdot Mirror
The Oft Frustrating Job of a Sysadmin
I_Love_Pocky! writes "Sysadmin Co. is a hilarious site built by some sysadmins at an ISP to help them vent their frustrations with dealing with non-tech types. This site is gives a hilarious picture of the daily frustrations of dealing with the inept. I am interested to see if these stories strike a chord with other admins out there."
Archive.org mirror.... http://web.archive.org/web/20030714083852/www.sysa dminco.com/main.php
Seems to still work, haven't tried loads.
Site not hilarious, not well designed either. Have to scroll to read more than a half dozen lines of text in a story. It basicaly a small handful of stories about customers that don't understand DNS. As a sysadmin type, I was sorely dissapointed. Not only that, but the site melted almost right away. Yawn, next?
good for a larf...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
This is a serious question, not a troll or an attempt to start a fight....
Here it is: How would you "farm the load", "load balance", or otherwise prevent a slashdot effect on a small to medium size web server? Say you are running Apache, MySql, PHP, or some other scripting language on a small to medium sized box. You only have one webserver to work with. what steps can be taken to prevent slashdotters from bringing a site to its knees? Any suggestions?
Here's links to google cache mirrors for the site:
:-)
techisms
bossisms
qotd
I need the karma
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
and I find it funny when "supposedly technically literate people" like yourself assume the site was built to handle slashdot levels of traffic and that all web sites should be able to as well. So I'm setting up a joke site, let's order a few grand in servers, hook up to a good fat pipe or sign up for hosting and bleed money for that, etc. etc. What are you people smoking?
Try here: Memorable Quotes from Alt.Sysadmin.Recovery.
.sig comes from?
Guess where my
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
The comic strip User Friendly often visits the topic of frustrated sysadmins. Good for a laugh. I have and recommend all of the books.
Actual dialogue of a former WordPerfect Customer Support employee:
[snip]
Incorrect.
--- There isn't any problem that can't be solved by a small, low yield nuclear device, is there??
I think the sysadmins are largely responsible for these clueless users making silly requests. Not on the admin-level necessarily, but on the executive tech type level. Let me give you one example.
With Win2000, when you print a document, a printer icon appears on the system tray. Double-click this icon, and the network printer you're using shows up and lists the currently queued jobs. So if a document doesn't print out, take a look at the printer, figure out what user is holding up the line, and ask him to cancel. Or if you accidently print 10 copies of your overheads for a talk, you can easily cancel your own print job. Took about 10 seconds start to finish. It always seemed to work, and was never a problem. My guess is that is occasionally took a sysadmin 15 minutes to solve a problem caused by someone canceling the wrong job. Time is money! So naturally, the admins "improved" it.
How? Well, they removed the ability to view the current queue of jobs. So now we can't cancel our own print jobs, or figure out who the bastard is who's holding up the line. What do we do now? Call our support desk. Enter our employee number, choose the correct option from a choice of 5, wait on hold for one of our sysadmins, tell him or her the problem. Tell them the name of the printer. Verify our employee number. Job is cancelled. The last two times I've done this, it's taken about 10 minutes of my time, and about 2 minutes for the admins. And my time costs the company a lot more money than the sys admins time. But the costs for running the support center went down, so it must be good!
Honestly, this is more descriptive of the level of Dilbertism present than a general indictment of admins. To tie in with the original post, this is what causes user frustration. Thinks work fine, someone who "knows better" changes things to make them supposedly better (but actually just more complicated), and the user gets frustrated. Waiting on hold for 10 minutes to cancel a print job (when I should be doing other work) is really frustrating. Add in instances where the admins re-start computers which are in the middle of hours-longs computations without bothering to check in with the users, and it creates generally feelings of hostility towards the tech support staff.
So you want smarter or nicer users? Spend a little time understanding how the admin actions affect the end-user before implementing brain-dead improvements. I suggest doing this by asking them.
Read Donald A. Norman's book "The design of everyday things." You'll find that the fault lies with the designer of the door.
Actually one program I found REALLY good for things like that is "Deep Freeze". It lets boot up and you notice nothing different but you CAN'T change the drive. Once you reboot it will go back to normal. Your user could delete the windows dir, it would break then simply reboot and it comes back. This would be good for more public computers not as much a "personal" computer. You can always "thaw" a drive if you wanted to tho.
Deepfreeze USA
Here is a nifty link if your intrested
Solosoft.org - Your Online Resource to Nothing
By "rules", do you mean technical requirements or policies
I was a simple way of saying "the way we have chosen to run the infrastructure such that all critical services are avaialable all the time". That includes both the technical configurations, and the administrative policies.
But if the latter, I care not for the rules.
To be frank, I don't care if a user likes the "rules" or not. They are there for a reason. I am prefectly willing to work with them to find a way for them to get what they need done within the constraints of our environment, but that does not include simply giving them admin access and walking away.
What, they turned off their antivirus software? Or the automatic updates thereof? Or they uninstalled it completely?
Several people have made this comment (or a similar one about not having an adequate Anti-Virus setup). Let me explain those of you who quite obviously have not had to deal with the situation this past two weeks: The recent Bagle, MyDoom, and Netsky viruses were being released faster than the AV companies could update defs. Once they did release them, it takes my organization 3 hours to push the updates to all 15,000 clients. In that 3 hours, we routinely had several people manage to infect themselves with these viruses. MyDoom in particualar was setup to randomly delete files from any accesible drive. Several users with admin access had thier machines trashed as critical system files were deleted. Now, this is a gross simplification of the events of the past two weeks, but it's a good rough example of what I'm talking about.
http://www.techtales.com/