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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'll never forget, he said "There was no way to know that the backups were failing without looking at the log file." This statement was made 17 months after the backups stopped working....
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
Then again, I have found that treating my userbase as people, and not as trained monkeys, tends to have better results than trying to be mister 31337 BOFH.
They sure can keep a server running great, can't they...
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
This site is gives a hilarious picture of the daily frustrations of dealing...with slashdotted sites.
I know its daily for me.
was a lady running a Mandrake system asking me about saving files to a disk. She was having troubles and thought that maybe automount wasn't working. I went over there, put in a disk, and copied the file.
Her problem - she hadn't put a disk in the drive.
Chaos will always win out over order because chaos is more organized
Archive.org mirror.... http://web.archive.org/web/20030714083852/www.sysa dminco.com/main.php
Seems to still work, haven't tried loads.
I find it funny that a site designed by a bunch of sysadmins to vent their frustrations will likely be very frustrated when /. hammers it into the ground.
This post have been here for less that 5 mins and i'm already getting mysql_connect errors!
-Kilka
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all. -Chomsky
I worked support for a long time. I don't think the users are inept...I think they just have other interests besides computers. I mean, if a brain surgeon or nobel prize winner calls for help on setting up dialup networking, are they a idiot user? I don't see doctors making websites about what idiots we are when we call them for medical advice.
Nope, just their site, it seems.
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?
I am a student working at a helpdesk at a university, one day we came in to a voicemail from a user where they apparently thought they hung up the phone but they hit the 3 way button and well ill let you guys listen for yourselves.
http://s.bouncybouncy.net/call/
good for a larf...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Warning: mysql_pconnect(): /home/garweb/inc/connection.php on line 15
Connection could not be established
Too many connections in
wow, these guys sure are some ub3r 31337 sys4dm1n5.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Check out the Gnu Know your System Administrator field guide and Top 100 things you don't want the sysadmin to say ...
That reminds me of this comment from earlier today, which gives the top 10 reasons for committing seppuku (a Japanese form of ritual suicide by disembowelment)
.vbs & .exe attachments at the mail server because he is an amature (read: terrible) coder. Moreover, his amature programs cause as much if not more trouble than the virus-laden attachments he keeps opening. He also has crazy ideas about putting "stamps" on email.
-----
Here are the top 10 reasons:
10) You've just been ordered to migrate from sendmail to Exchange server.
9) Your boss, let's just call him Bill, insists upon being given root priviledges, in spite of the fact that he constantly breaks things even with mere user priviledges.
8) Your boss won't let you filter out
7) You are told by your boss, who (mis)read a computer security advisory to put the company webserver (which handles online sales) on a non-standard port "so the hackers won't be able to mess with it."
6) Your boss expects you to find a way to make your Solaris servers, with tons of ancient, crufty legacy code which is vital to the company, run ASP pages just so they can use (read: justify the rediculous expense of) some crappy B2B application they bought without consulting IT. Preferably sometime next week.
5) Your boss thinks that some 'internet accelerator' software (read: spyware) should be made mandatory for all employees to improve productivity.
4) Your "security policy" is more like a list of who to blame for what.
3) Your boss is negotiating a SCO IP license, since "any publicity is good publicity."
2) Your boss thinks you should be more thankful, because the management is so "IT-savvy" and always ready to help you out.
1) You ignore all this bad advice, pretend you took it anyway (he'll never actually know...), and waste your time posting on Slashdot instead of working.
After about a month on the job, my boss came to me one day and said, "What do you use to read your email?" I reply, "Well, in windows, I use eudora, and in unix, pine. Which system did you mean? (everyone had a solaris and windows machine)" "Unix", he says, "Show me this pine program, I've been using this program, I forget the name, and the problem is, whenever I get an attachment it screws up the screen and I have to scroll past it. " So I show him pine, and as im leaving I say, "Just out of curiosity do you recall the name of the program you were using?" To which he replies "Oh yea! Its called .... um ... TAIL!"
Sure enough, the poor SOB had been running tail on his mail spool to read his mail. His spool was 150 megs and had every email he'd recieved since the lab opened in 1991 (this was in 2000).
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I have a PhD cust who spends like 400 a month for ISDN as opposed to DSL (it is available to him) and I always shamefully get his transferred calls:
PhD: Look I know what I'm doing I have a PhD and I'm telling you your system is erratic
Meanwhile the guy has his modem set to dial his own phone number AND HE USES CAPS ALL THE TIME so his username/password is almost always the issue. This after I've spoken to him like umpteen who knows how many times. He also has a T1 at his company and always calls:
PhD: my router isn't working and I'm getting very tired of your company doing this to me.
Meanwhile he disconnects his routers to put on wireless switches, faxes, jams phone cords in his ethernet ports, tries to jam his T1 cord into his phone, tries to make calls through his T1 you name it. I have no pity for people you have to explain things over to a trillion times. Users suck
MoFscker
I interviewed for a web-admin job a few years ago. They asked me "How would you troubleshoot a blue screen of death?" With a smile on my face, I replied "I'd press F1 and ask Clippy!" Ah we all had a good chuckle at that. Heh. Didn't get the job, though.
"Derp de derp."
I was once at my parents' place. They just bought a brand new CD burner and my dad was interested in backing up his files. Specifically, he had a lot of contacts and e-mails in Outlook. He asked me to check the state of his backup to see if he had done it properly. The result? One "Microsoft Outlook.lnk" on a single CD-R. He had dragged the outlook shortcut to the CD in an attempt to "back up" his outlook files.
"We demand that you notify us of system crashes beforehand."
Scary part, I was working at a High Energy Physics research lab. I said, "No problem, but I'll need a Higgs Boson to do it."
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Not your typical Sysadmin story...
I work for a large auto parts retailer (nope, not Auto Zone!).
Each of our stores has a Linux system in it, using Comtrol serial boards to run the serial terminal and printers in the store.
One of our stores decided to do some rearranging, and wanted to move the main counter a few inches. The counter isn't bolted to the floor, but it does run the full width of the store, and is pretty much permanently wired for electricity and serial connections where it is--it's not meant to be moved.
So, what did the store do? They moved the counter. With everything on it. With all the terminals and printers on said counter plugged in. And turned on.
The employees heard a few 'pop's and looked up to see smoke coming from all the terminals.
The best we can figure is the main power line running into the counter was punctured or otherwise shorted, shorting hot to either ground or neutral. Naturally, the terminals weren't on any sort of surge protectors. I doubt this would have helped, though, unless they had good Triplite or another good name-brand surge protector on it (which won't happen--too expensive--yep, the usual story).
The incident didn't just destroy the terminals on the counter, though! It made it's way through the serial lines and destroyed every piece of serial-connected equipment in the entire store.
The serial card looks like somebody took a blow-torch to it. I really wish I had a picture of it to post here, but I haven't taken one yet (it's hanging on our 'wall of shame' at the moment).
Amazingly--somehow--the PC is fine. I've had it running stress-tests for 3 weeks now, with no problems. There are scorch marks around the PCI connector and in the bottom of the case. Most of the ICs on the serial board were reduced to nothing but ashes instantly--the rest blew into pieces.
Try here: Memorable Quotes from Alt.Sysadmin.Recovery.
.sig comes from?
Guess where my
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
The most dangerous sysadmin is the one who believes that he's dealing with inept people when the real ineptness is found within. Whole corporate IT policies are dictated by these people *all* the time.
This was several years ago - before DHCP. As sysadmin, I kept the list of IP addresses assigned to the computers.
Newbie tech, right out of school (I'll call him 'D.') comes up to me, while I'm in the middle of something.. he says "I'm working on the machine in shipping, and I need its' IP address."
I say "no problem", point to a piece of paper, and say "they're all on that piece of paper". He takes the piece of paper, copies down the number, and goes away.
A few minutes later, he comes back, and says "that must be wrong - it tells me that it's in use."
I tell him "that's weird - I'll come take a look at it in a few minutes."
So I finish what I'm working on, and go to shipping.. I ask "D. said there was a problem with your machine." They shrug, and said "it's working OK right now." Just to be sure, I take a look at it, and the IP address is correct, and the machine is working fine, so I go back to my desk.
Two hours later, D. comes back to my desk and asks if I'm done yet.. I tell him I went to the shipping computer, and it was working fine.
He tells me "No, I'm at my bench, setting up a new system for them, and when I enter the IP address and connect to the network, it tells me that the IP address is in use."
I guess he skipped the class where they talked about IP addresses having to be unique.
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
Now this is OK to say Luser b/c it was a vendor.
After meeting vendor wants to see my "intrastructure"... so I take him to the server room which due to some repairs has a HUGE A/C unit with a big silver pipe going into the ceiling. Geek that I am I have affixed a sticker on it that says "UNIX".
We go over server sever and their functions and he points to the A/C and says, "Oh you guys run Linux?"
"No just regular old Unix."
"So what's the bad boy do?"
"What's it do? Look at it! Look at the pipe on that thing!"
"Oh yeah..." he says knowingly, "What's the specs?"
"This sucker is pushing 250,000 BTUs."
"Wow! Man on a Windows box that'd be BSOD City."
"Yes. Yes it would."
We didn't buy his product.
This
That guy's my personal hero (kept me sane during those long 3 hour blocks of no tech support calls).
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
You know you are a sysadmin when you hear the phrase "users are losers" and don't think of drugs.
Our big boss is totally computer/technology illiterate. Let me show you the depths of his abyssmal knowledge of the most simple of tasks...
These are things he says to me...
My son just sent me this digital clock can you set it up for me?
This fucking printer never works! My response-Do you see the toner light flashing? That means it's out.
The reason he gets so pissed is because he prints every email everyday and then goes in the woman's bathroom to drop a stinky load while reading through them. No joke!
He keeps a minimum of 5000 emails in his inbox and around 5000 in sent and another 10000 in deleted. Yes it's a lovely thing along with his constant crashing of outlook (it doesn't need much help)!
Our top MCSE (oxymoron) will take down the network mid-day while warning no one and usually has problems getting it back up yet our big boss refers to him as the "GENIUS".
I never understood how pop-ups tricked people until I saw our big box click on one that said "YOU HAVE WON!". I was enlightened to say the least.
The rest of the users I support, around 80, are unbelievably computer illiterate...to the point of myself just letting them talk about what they think they know so they will just stfu!
For example one guy was trying to convince me how DVDXcopy rips dvd in mp3 format and he finds the quality superior to DVD.
WTF?
As usual I just listened till he left since it's pointless to respond because these fucking idiots know they are right.
One of the funniest things that happened was when our top MCSE (Oxy Moron x 2) opened an infected attachment and set in motion a massive virus outbreak. File servers, mail servers, beepersystem, phone systems, etc. all dead in a matter of minutes as we run M$ shiite and it was unpatched.
Yet another fucking no brainer!
Does anyone here just throw out big tech terms just to see the user you're talking to implode from their lack of trying to comprehend something well beyond their comprehension?
Here are my favorite questions to ask even before getting started on solving an issue.
Is it plugged in?
Are you logged in as yourself?
Do you know your name?
Do you know what printer you printed to?
Did your parents have any kids that lived?
How can you be so fucking stoopid?
One last thing....
Our big boss is an unbelievable, accidental bug finder no matter what he uses. He can break any and all software/hardware you throw at him and have no idea how it happened but the funniest thing ever involving him wasn't really him but to me personified his luck with pc's, etc.
This is short and sweet...
I was going through my email and received and email from him. I clicked on the email and in that instant the power blinked in the building and went out for hours. I know this has nothing to do with him but can anyone actually prove it?
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
You've just been ordered to migrate from sendmail to Exchange server.
That one works in either direction. I'd regard the nasty things like nitro myself. If it's working doooon't screw with it. Exchange and Sendmail? That's like trying to choose between a root canal and a rectal exam.
One of my own favorite sysadmin stories comes from when I was doing support in a General's staff office. The user had been having problems with her computer so I had the computer unplugged while I had it opened and was replacing the modem.
In the middle of the procedure, a device on the desk next to us starting this warbling noise-- user jumps a little bit and says "What does that mean?".
"Well, seeing as that device is your phone, I think it means that someone is calling you."
I think it is time to outsource the Bullshitters. The CEOs, CFOs, VPs, and other non-essential non-producing assholes.
Some one in India can sit at a desk and play solitaire just as well all day too for a lot less cost.
Who will guard the guards?
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.