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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."
I need to check to see how may pages of users trying to open up virus stories there are.
There's a difference between being an idiot, and being an 'idiot user'.
The two are mutually exclusive.
You must not know many doctors, I hear plenty of them joking about how stupid the average person is when it comes to preventive medicine and home remedies.
Don't park drunk, accidents cause people.
Seriously. I remember reading those "tech support humor sites" where they would go off on idiots while at the same time illustrating a huge amount of technical illiteracy themselves. One of the worst was a guy who chastised a woman for calling her PC's case (I.e. the big metal box part) the "engine.", while he called it the "CPU". Neither one of them knew the correct term, but the woman was at least thinking about it and coming up with terms on her own. The tech support guy was an idiot.
Yeah, there can be stupid users out there. There can also be idiotic sys-admins. At my high school, I once lost half a semester's work on a video project due to their (moronic) synching software crashing halfway through. (When you logged on, you're files would be copied over. With my hundreds of megs of video files this could take five minutes. If the upload failed, and you logged off, you would have a blank folder copied over to the system.
I went to the sys-admin's office and told him that my files were gone. He disappeared into his office for a few minutes, and came back out and said "yup, they're gone." I'm like "do you do backups?" and he's like "backups?"
bleh. if they had any brains, they'd be designing these systems, not servicing them.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
My favorite conversation I had as a sysadmin highly frustrated years ago. We had some old SunOS systems and newer, but still old HP-UX systems that came in and was trying to get things to work at least relatively seamlessly, and for some reason or another something wasn't working right (was many years ago, have no idea, probably an nfs issue/nis configuration). Anyway, so one non-technical user was there as I was trying to get some basic, critical functionality restored. She was curious and asked:
'What's wrong with it, what are you trying to fix?'
My response: 'You see, our old network smokes crack, and these new systems.... well they smoke crack too, but it's different crack and they don't seem to be capatible crack'
She gota tad angry and obviously felt insulted by my talking down (probably thought I was talking that way because she was a girl) and said 'I can handle a more technical explanation than that!'
My honest response: "Well *I* can't"
At which point she understood and laughed rather than be angry.
Another one of my past stories, I was working with this contractor once and he was charged with the task of configuring a new HP-UX server that had been ordered. He hooks it up to the network alongside the main nfs/nis HP-UX server of the company, and strolls back to his desk and telnets into the IP he thought he was assigning. Suddenly he thinks 'hmmm.... the hostname of this new box happens to be the same as our main server... better change that.... wow, the IP it will enact in a minute too, that is *really* weird, well, better change, reboot and.....' Suddenly, across the company systems hung as the NIS/NFS server moved. The contractor had no idea what was happening until someone else took a look...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
True story.
My coworker mentioned to his boss that he could tell every time she got email because her system beeped. She said she'd like to turn it off, but didn't know how. He proposed just muting the volume. She complained "But then I wouldn't be able to hear the clicky sound of the keys when I'm typing." He gave her a blank stare, trying to figure out if she was joking or not, then she put her ear up to the keys and started pressing them. "Yeah, I couldn't hear them" she affirmed, then started clicking the mouse "or the clicking sound of the mouse."
This is one of our lead programmers by the way. *sigh*
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WARNING:Slashdot karma not redeemable in the afterlife.
I'm going to have to defend other professionals here; when I was working tech support for HP all in one printers on the mac (awful awful devices that crash constantly and we were not allowed to tell you how to fix them properly- (the proper solution almost allwase being 'use the cups drivers')) the people who had the greatest ability to understand complex instructions were the doctors and lawyers who called in.
They might have been completely clueless at the beginning of the call- but they'd be able to write down (I hate people who refuse to write things down, and then call back with the same problem a half hour later), and follow complex sets of instructions without any problem. They would also readily accept critiques like 'If you continue to use that 9 meter USB cable your going to get more comunication errors then if you had bought a 2 meter one'; and except for there asking me what that was in feet all was well (being a canadian I refused to switch to imperial unless specifically asked; and never refered to the letter z as 'zee' instead using the most sensible 'zed' (because this way you don't get it confused with 'c' as 'see')
This may have something to do with them being mac users, but we had a lot of very dumb mac uses call in too. Though not as dumb as the windows users who were convinced they were using 'macintosh windows XP'
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
At a government office where I worked once (best places to get this kind of story, near as I can tell), one of the techs (who I sat near) came in and told everyone to gather 'round. He said he just got back from a half-hour conversation which consisted of him explaining to a user why the print-screened copy of an application window she had put in Word wouldn't respond to its buttons being clicked. "It's like a calculator and a picture of a calculator. You can't press the buttons in the picture and expect it to work, can you?" A larf was had by all.
Now, being a technically-inclined programmer, I rarely have reason to deal with techs. Most of my problems, I successfully deal with myself. Therefore, unfortunately, most of the interactions tend to be about disruptive hardware upgrades or else special handling for me because I need more access than is standard in the organization. At one place I worked, not only could you not install your own software by default, but in fact had no access at all (much less write access) to most of your own C: drive. They give me more permissions grudgingly and eye me with suspicion, and even then only after being so ordered by a mutual superior. So naturally I tend to see them as fascist policy-drones. Too bad, that; we'd probably be good geeky buddies otherwise.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
As others have pointed out, there is a difference between somebody who doesn't know how to use computers, and someone who is stupid/inept/incapable of listening.
I'm an phone support agent for a large ISP, and quite good at my job. I can quite happily talk someone through the entire troubleshooting routine in just a few minutes. However, once a month or so you run into that one person who refuses to listen, tries to tell you why you are wrong and just fix it already, can't type the same thing twice in a row, and takes 8 minutes of explanation to find the "forward slash" button on the keyboard. (He couldn't find the question mark key either.) THOSE are the clients you get mad at.
There is a difference between stupidity and ignorance. Ignorance can be cured.
Story from my previous doomed job:
After I had been working there a while and mentioned time and time again their infrastructure *needed* a more controlled storage strategy (as it was, critical data was spread across many non-redundant systems (whichever happened to have free space at the time), and added drives ad-hoc to whatever was there. When time was up on the current storage and they were just about to order an extra 40 GB disk to slap in an Ultra 10 to bolster things, one drive crashed hard and took out critically important data. So I'm finally asked to, on a shoestring budget, give them a decent file server with some redundancy. I price out a PC system to put linux on and 6 cheap IDE disks and three IDE controllers, all new, warrantied parts that would interoperate in a standard way such that any one component failure would leave an easily recoverable situation, even if not necessarily highly available (even if totally destroyed, a tape unit would at least finally be effective being attached to more than 1% of the companies date).
After viewing this, the guy actually making the purchase says 'IDE is not enterprise quality! You can get SCSI storage on a shoestring budget!' and proceeds to acquire a rack-mountable, 14-or-so hotswap SCSI enclosure with 18 GB discs...from some random eBayer, no warranty, no service, no promises, and blows more than the entire budget I was told to go with on *just* a hardware RAID controller. After a week of them using it strongly against my warnings, the whole thing goes down unrecoverably bad... turns out the SCSI enclosure had a malfunctioning backplane and had been corrupting data all the while....
It turned out that before I was around they had a Maxtor IDE-based NAS with two drives per chain and running Windows 2000. One drive went bad and the system went down hard as the other drive on the chain was unreachable. Though all data was recovered when Maxtor sent a drive 2 days later (they didn't want to run non-redundant or with unsupported IDE disks for fear of losing something without recourse.. understandable at least) and so the business guy had learned IDE==bad, lose data.
I told him that in this case, it would be one drive per channel, and in the event of failure any ol drive from the local Best Buy would do and he wouldn't have to wait days for a replacement, but that whole job was an exercise of great accountibilty with zero authority to do anything about anything...
Almost every job before and the job I have held since has been infinitely better.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
They may have another skill set, but when the corporation puts a computer on their desk, that corporation is saying, We got you this whizbang gizmo, now earn your pay.
Not as a sysadmin but I show people the ropes, enough to get around and not lose stuff, and I admire people that were willing to learn. There are *thousands* of books that can help them learn more if they are so inclined, I tell them, just focus on the ones that help you get the job done.
You still come across people who have yet to get with the program though, for whom the computer is such a burden, and I have no sympathy for them. It's simply not the right tool for his job, and that same computer would get more mileage from a poor 13-year old's hands if it were donated to charity.
Any org that doesn't trust their programmer (good or bad) to write to their own workstation's disk...well...
I gotta wonder...which came first, the bad programmers or the bad policy?
Blar.
Said troll is also hooking several of you I'm sure.
Remember... in IT, we don't make money for you, we keep you from losing money. All we want is a percentage to spend on cool shit.
"We are not tolerant people. We prefer drastically effective solutions"
I think you have to take in several things into account when dealing with users. There are so many different scenarios and so many different types of users. When I first arrived at this position, I was coming from the perspective that an earlier comment talked about, about keeping things as locked down and tight as possible. No one should have admin access, because if they did, they would inevitably download a virus that would wipe out their machine, and then it would be my ass on the line because (1) we weren't doing windows client backups, and (2) 5 hours of my time is essentially wasted on the menial task of reinstalling the said user's machine.
Before I continue, I must state that I'm primarily talking about windows admin access. UNIX and MAC OS's deal much better with privilege situations and is much easier to deal with on the sysadmin's part.
One of the problems that comes up if you were to enforce that no one has admin access is that it is imperative you have a publicly available written policy stating the in's and out's of giving or not giving users admin access.
My previous place of employment, which was particularly tight on this issue, had a policy that stated we would not provide support to users who wanted admin access to their machine. Perhaps this works for them, but in my department I could never enforce something like this. Several of my users must have administrative access to run certain programs that do not correctly work when run by a non-admin user. These people are also largely non-technical. If that person does something stupid and wipes out their machine, I can't just be BOFH and give them the reinstall disk. This is especially true when dealing with office politics. If Mr. Executive Director comes to me after having wiped out his machine because I was forced to give him admin access, I pretty much have to drop what I'm doing and fix the problem. I think this is just part of being an SA.
Then there's the scenario where Joe Blo is fairly technically adept and wants to have more control over his system so he can install programs, etc.. It's more beneficial for the SA to give him elevated privileges than for him to come to the SA three times a week to perform some task that keeps the SA from doing the really cool and interesting stuff that got him interested in being an SA in the first place.
While being an SA is great for those reasons, I don't know of any SA who is an SA solely because they like dealing with users. Dealing with users is just part of the job (unless you're in charge of a team and can just assign someone under you to do it). I believe it is imperative that you treat users on an individual basis and that you treat them with respect. Yeah, they may be the stupidest computer users from hell, but you need to figure out how to deal with that in the most efficient way possible. The goal of a good SA is equally 50% user satisfaction and 50% SA effectiveness and efficiency.
It's often amazing how otherwise intelligent people can be unbelievably stupid.
For example, I have a friend who got top marks in Computer Science, went on to do Honours, and he is now doing his Masters in his spare time. He's one of the brightest people I know. He can code like a natural, can design like a professional, and holds down an important and well paid job as a J2EE designer.
One day he was describing to me how a PIII running Linux is way better than a Sun E10k. I thought he was joking at first. No, he was being serious. Apparently he'd ran the same database software and J2EE application on both systems and the Linux system smoked the E10k in performance.
After a little prodding I find out his domain on the E10k was only 4 CPUs and was memory starved.
After a little more prodding I find out that the database software they were using was single-threaded.
Yet pointing these facts out didn't convince him then of his mistake, and to this day he is convinced that E10ks are gutless wonders (which is true but not for the reasons he thinks).
So I learnt that day that anybody can make a mistake. The important lesson to learn is that the idiot might be yourself. I make an effort these days to be more humble when someone tells me I'm wrong; they might just be right.
One memorable incident was when one staff member sent another woman (who was theoretically at a position of the same level, but was younger) with a broken leg in a cast down the stairs to repeat the demand for a longer phone cord at a time when I and several others were furiously trying to get ALL the companies comms servers going again so customers could connect (which is something every employee in the building knew - and most could visualise a meter showing lost $ ticking over fast). In that situation a very nasty woman was proving her place in the pecking order by making unreasonable urgent demands on two people over a trivial issue. Various unprofessional threats were made to my chest hair (I'm serious folks) by several middle aged women that I had never met before and a nasty little guy who had the attitude that the whole world hated him because he was gay - so he has the right to take it out on anyone.
My contract was terminated after I took an unused printer away from the proximity of the nasty guy - he said it was "HIS", and couldn't understand that it belonged to the company, was paid for out of an IT budget, and that the boss of the person that had been using the printer previously would have a say but not him. The correct way to do things would have been to stroke his feelings, make him feel like the big alpha male he saw himself as in that corner of the office, talk to him in person and possibly swap the unused printer gathering dust with a bigger, more impressive one that was not as functional. The brief, polite but firm email to him on a busy day led to him yelling complaints at the top level of management - probably about attitude.
Putting pizza coupons in letterboxes for a few weeks after that was great fun in comparison, and got me out in the sunshine. Spam, but only on paper.
Currently the only social problems I have are guys bringing in their childrens computers for me to fix, but letting me think that they belong to the company. I probably would have done it anyway, but it really looks bad after you've postponed important work to try to recover a school assignment from a dead hard drive, and you really should be getting back to another site - the time for that is after hours for bonus karma, and working around my own schedule.
I did get "are we there yet" every few minutes on Friday, but it was a workstation used for transferring pay into bank accounts, so the user would get the same from others if I didn't fix it quickly. Working with people that have actually been to a university or have worked outside an office environment make being a sysadmin a lot easier. A guy who drives a truck knows that a computer is not a typewriter, that all kinds of things can go wrong, some can be fixed in seconds and others take serious time.