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Top 10 System Administrator Truths
Vo0k writes "What are your top ten system administrator truths? We all know them already, but it's still fun re-telling them. Stuff like "90% of all hardware-related problems come from loose connectors", even though you already know it's true, may save you from replacing the "faulty" motherboard if you recall it at the right time."
... are operator errors. But you can't tell the operator that.
australian project gutenberg is better than the original.
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Getting Help
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Other People
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Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
Never post stupid top ten administrator lists on Slashdot, lest I have to spend my time restoring a web server from backup.
the future is but past forgotten
... even though it's better than it used to be, registry corruption is still the number one cause of boot failures in Windows XP. And the contents ntbtlog.txt and the Recovery Console are still horribly inadequate tools for fixing it...
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
The solution to the problem is almost always simpler than you think. You can often cause more problems trying to fix a problem then the original problem itself. When you try one thing and it doesn't work, reverse the changes before trying the next thing and document each change.
Bradley Holt
When all else fails, reboot. If it still fails, blame the user.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
IT'S NOT A CUPHOLDER!!
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
PEBKAC
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
1) Never believe anything anyone tells you: always test for yourself.
2) Always ask the dumb questions: is it switched on?
3) Reboot cures most things EXCEPT rm -r * when logged in as root
After that, things could get tricky.
I had a boss once who didn't lie to me but at the same time wouldn't follow my instructions when I had to help him over the phone. I'd tell him to do one thing. He'd do something else and then ask me what to do next. I'd tell him to do what I told him to do in the first place. After 3 or 4 tries, he'd actually do what I told him to do and his problem was usually solved.
Most users should not being allowed to operate computers, let alone drive cars. Sysadmins need to learn who these people are and minimize the damage they cause. I suggest randomly changing their password every day until they quit in frustration.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
-You shall be very pessimistic
-Make sure you can leave exactly like it was before you touched it.
-Dont fix what aint broken.
-Start from a known state of the system (switch off - switch on).
-Even you are genius level techie, follow the manual, RTFM.
-Dont reinvent the wheel. Compare with something thats working.
-Cables are not perfect. If something doesnt connect, check lower levels first.
-If its there, ther must be a reason. Never ever delete anything. Rename instead.
-You memory is not infinite. Write what you do.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
from bending them around and whatnot, they develop breaks that can get pushed back together. This is what causes the problem to be intermittent. The cable 'is' bad, not going bad. People need to be more careful in wrapping their cords up. There should be a little bit of slack in the loops or else the slightest bit of pressure will cause them to develop a break.
Rule 1. They lie. End users often tell you what they think you want to hear. When asking a question you should use terms like. What does it say? vs Does it say this?
Rule 2. They don't know they are lying.
Rule 3. Sometimes they are telling the truth. Yes sometimes what you think is impossible really is happening or looks like it is happening.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Unless you lack plans for the weekend.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Never put the screws back in the case until you've tested your new hardware is working.
It's a Unix system - I know this.
Maybe for a PC, but never a server.
:-P
When I started working at my job, we had serveral servers that would reboot on a cron for the sole reason that someone was too lazy to figure out the problem. We eliminated all but one of these reboots, mainly because we don't care about the last one.
My holy grail would have to be strace/truss/tusk. I would take that tool over reboot any day. It doesn't always fix the problem, but at least you will know what it is, instead of rebooting like a coward.
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
HPs Jetdirect cards have a pretty solid reputation of failing every few years
Is this really the case? We had several JetDirect enabled PCs at my former place of work and almost none of them had a card failure. We even had a few extra cards just in case. Several of the printers were actually quite old even. The biggest problem we had was with only HP-5P (I think that is the number). Some users departments did not have the money to replace those crappy old printers. On a bit of an aside, we had several JetDirect "boxes" (the external box that connected the printer port to ethernet) that were working great. I believe most everyone in the IT staff had one at home for their printers.
No One Ever Got Fired For Buying Microsoft.
Not really true. There are some shops so enamored with Novell (mostly because of bosses stuck in the stoneage) that the idea of purchasing Exchange or using a full out ActiveDirectory system with a Windows only network storage share were unheard of. I once again reference my previous job.
Not too bad of a list overall. Most of the items are right, and it is quite true. To be honest, the places I have worked there were really only a handful of problem employees, and most of them got handled directly by our SysAdmin or the head of IT because no wanted to worry about what lie they may come up with about the work we were doing.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Seriously, the "90% of all hardware-related problems come from loose connectors" bit is found nowhere in the article or on google for that matter...
Number One: You will die alone.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
If your job requires you to wear a name tag, carry a gun, or administer a Windows system, you have made a serious vocational error.
-- oh.... so..... sleeeeeepy.
In my Tech Support experience, I have found only three basic rules.
Rule number 1. People are stupid. This one is true of all people. Tech support, highways, shopping, whatever. This rule has been extended to cover just about any stupid thing that anyone does.
"Why did that guy just..."
"Rule number 1."
"Did she think she could get away with that?"
"Rule number 1."
Rule number 2. People lie.
Me: "Has the computer been restarted since the problem started?"
Them: "Yes..."
Me: "OK. Let's try restarting the computer now and see what happens."
Them: "What do you mean by restart?"
And when you add 1 and 2 together, you get 3. Sometimes, people are so stupid, they don't know that they're lying. You know these people. They're the ones who have "Windows 2000 XP" or "2000 ME." They're the people for whom "Nothing happens when I try to check my email. Nothing! Just this error message..." Not realizing that the error message is *exactly* what I was looking for. An error message is *not* nothing. Grr.
There is a fourth rule that also shows up from time to time:
Rule number 4. No good deed goes unpunished.
In the famous words of the leader of the Uruk Hai from his battle call at Helm's Deep in The Two Towers: "Grr."
It doesn't matter whether I'm giving or requesting tech support, the number one rule is that the person on the other end of the telephone is an idiot.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Don't get linked to by Slashdot!
None of the other nine truths will save your server!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
If the acronym contains an F, don't ask what it stands for.
Support the FairTax
Spontaneously combust
Trust me -- you do not want to get that call:
Caller: You know that machine in (room) that has a sign that says 'do not turn me off'? You: YesBuild it, and they will come^Hplain.
One of my big truths, set standards!
I've worked in two kinds of places, ones where they set (and stick to) standards and ones that don't. Every place that doesn't use or doesn't stick to standards has always been an experience in wasted time, confusion, and lots of bugs. Those that do can seem like you're always being nagged but in the end you find things work as expected, code is far easier to manage (especially when it is someone else's), and you aren't always having to reinvent the wheel (i.e. figuring out how to fix a subtle bug again because the solution was never written down the first time).
It sounds simple but it takes discipline at all levels. Even something as documenting what you did afterwards and putting it in an orderly file system can make a huge difference but how many people bother to do it? Managers and fellow developers have to crack the whip and keep people from trying to cut corners.
Standards should be open to some change and can be bent but there has to be a very good defendable reason for it.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
One of the most frustrating things is users who do what you ask, and then promptly do a bunch of things immediately afterwards that you don't ask. You try going step-by-step with them, and meanwhile they are opening menus and clicking away at things they don't understand, because somehow hearing your voice tell them what to do gives them all the control of a runaway horse.
Now let me just kill that last background process with the old 'kill %1'
[$researchgroupserver]: kill 1 enter
Crap!
Treat users with respect even if they are clearly in the wrong. Don't patronise somebody if they haven't got the first idea about computers: educate, don't insult. I'm not a buddhist but the old karma idea of "what goes around, comes around" seems to play out in the long term. Being patient with somebody who's royally screwed up their computer pays off in six months time when you need them to put your expenses claim through accounts at 5pm on a Friday evening/ notice you standing in the rain by your broken down car/..../
I know, those are all corrolaries of Murphy's law, but hey.
[Pruneau
Even if you've been doing this for 20 years. If you are working with another technician, have the grace to treat them like an intelligent human being.
bun-fhuinneog agam!
For some reason, I read that as "Always enrage the user", which is also useful advice.
Badass Resumes
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I have a friend living the GeekSquad life. I'd never hire him as he believes in their process to fix lockups:
1. It must be this unsupported software: remove Firefox or any F/OSS.
2. It is a virus, your AV is no good, purchase Norton CoverYourAss v9.6 for $49.95.
3. The AV doesn't perform a deep clean by itself, we can run one for $24.95.
4. You need a bigger hard drive, w recommend Norton Ghost to copy it. $199.95 + $49.95.
5. We should install the drive. $24.95 + $8.95 wrist strap.
6. We should run ghost for you, $19.95.
7. You need USB 2.0 ports for your mouse to run faster, $49.95 plus $24.95 installation.
8. Your hard drive cables are old belt style, you needbthe snappy round cables, $29.95 plus $9.95 installation.
9. Your video board is old, the ATI MegaWow XL is only $199.95.
10. You should probably buy one of our Compaq BusinessPro by HP combinations, you burned your TCP/IP converter with static.
I pop open the discarded PC, replace the processor fan and blow out the case. All is fine - $30.
Isn't it ironic that a web site about sys admin problems has given a system admin another problem by slashdotting it?
My current favourite question, when people's monitors don't come on after they've moved the computer, or got a new one, is "Is there more than one monitor port? Have you tried both?".
:)
They always claim there is only one socket the monitor will plug into, and without fail so far there has been an onboard one, which they are using, and one on a card, which is the one they should be using, and have completely missed
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
"Rule #10 - The Holy Grail of Tech Support is the reboot"
If you believe this or if you need this, you are running a
POS operating system and its probably from Microsoft.
That this would even be considered a rule by a professional IT
worker is all the proof we need that Bill Gates has caused
more damage than he can ever hope to make up for.
What utter crap.
On a 24x7x365 job, I learned the value of walking through the user's work area every weekday morning, first thing.
They started waiting for me to stroll in instead of paging me at night, just to be nice to me.
But the best part was, they thought of me as the guy who keeps the system running, because most of the time that I showed up, the system was running.
My colleagues who only showed up when their systems broke had the reputation "Here comes trouble!"
Taking credit for things going well is essential!
MICROSOFT is an acronym: My Intel Computer Runs On Software Often Failing Totally (c) 2005 an_unknown_soldier
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
10) Patch Current. Then ask for the unreleased patches. Then ask for development involvement.
9) Patching only works 30% of the time
8) Metalink is like a massive "Magic 8 Ball" that pulls responses from the database. Treat it as such.
7) Tars are the same as 8, except you have a customer service rep reading the 8 Ball.
6) If it generates core files it's the DBA's problem.
5) It's ALWAYS the DBA's fault.
4) RMAN is your friend.
3) You know more about Apache than Oracle does.
2) Oracle won't admit this.
1) Autconfig doesn't.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Great. Glad you feel that way. Now, before we all hug, skip, and fling daisies, you need to remember ONE thing:
THERE ARE NO FEELINGS IN IT. EVER.
Feelings are reserved for secretaries named Gladys who come crying to you when they accidently delete all the pictures of their grand kids.
"This article is very comforting."
You better sack the hell up if you are going to make it in the IT world.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
...is the result of trying to implement 100% of user requests. Sometimes, telling the user "no, you simply can't have that" is the best way to ensure an application isn't horribly poisoned by thousands of totally irrational, non-intuitive crap "features" each piece of which makes sense only to the person who requested it. Worse, such design-by-committee applications are invariably written interface-first, back-end last with no regard to how to actually make the goddamned thing WORK, much less work efficiently.
I agree, good software should be intuitive, but far better to be proactively engineered to be more intuitive, rather than reactively veneered to feel less unintuitive.
My standard pep talk:
Users are idiots. This is a good thing.
We expect them to be computer illiterate, and they rarely disappoint.
If I'm working at a biotech company, I don't want the researchers to be good at computers. If I'm working at an investment firm, I want the users to understand investments, not DLL's.
We're here precisely so that they can be idiots at computers... and experts at whatever it is they do when their computers aren't broken.
The company isn't here so that we have a network to play with.
Learn to praise the users' idiocy, they'll appreciate it.
If the users get frustrated, empathize with their confusion and blame Microsoft. Never fails.
Seriously, anthropomorphizing machines is a powerful technique. It gives you an approximate but effective mental model of a complex system. "Primitive" cultures are not dumb when they attribute personalities to objects. Our brains are wired to use personality to predict complex behaviour.
My Mother had no technical skills or knowlege - but she treated the automobile like a pet. She was alert to the tiniest change in sound or vibration of the machine, and very often alerted my Dad to problems long before he was aware of anything. One time, driving across country, my Mom said the right front wheel "didn't sound right". We were cruising along at 70, and everything seemed fine. But she insisted, so my Dad pulled over and checked all the tires. No sign of a problem. He pulled the hub cap off the right front wheel - and noticed that the cotter pin had broken! A few more miles and the wheel would have come off. My Dad panicked, since we didn't have any cotter pins in his repair kit. But my Mom dug in her purse and offered a bobby pin. My Dad didn't want to use it, because it was the wrong kind of metal and would break easily. My Mom said she had more, so he put it in. That bobby pin took us another 5000 miles.
My Dad does all his own work on his cars - at least he did until he ruined the valves on his Honda Accord a few years ago. Now he lets a mechanic do some stuff for him. I learned to be in tune with machines from my Mom, and learned to fix them from my Dad. When designing file system software back in the '70s, the rhythmic sounds of the disk access mechanism was my best feedback on its efficiency. Those were the days of 14" disk platters.
Nah, carbon based errors, instead of silicon based errors. 99% of people won't get it - unless you work at a chemical plant!
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
1) Document everything. I've had coworkers who thought being asked to document their processes and procedures meant they would soon be canned. If you document your processes, you can pass them off to other team members when you tire of them, so you can move on to bigger and better problems. 2) Talk out loud when working with users. It was a habit I got into while doing field service. Explain what you are doing while you are doing it and a) the users may learn something, and b) it lets them know you're not related to Nick Burns (SNL). By taking the time to explain things (knowing most users won't understand any of it to begin with), the users will know that you are interested (okay, some may feign interest) in their problems and the resolution. After doing this for years, I have seen many technophobic users start to come around to where they will actually try to fix a problem themselves before calling the help desk. 3) Problem always happen on Fridays just before quitting time.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
I am a Microsoft Certified Reboot Specialist.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
This list is for on-site support techs, not Systems Administrators. A real SysAdmin would *never* reboot a Production system unless it was absolutely required (or running Windows). If this were a list made by a real SysAdmin it would read a bit more like this:
#1. The User has no idea what you do, but they will blame their problems on you.
Some guy on the support desk bumped a call to you saying you had a server problem, the user doesn't have internet access, forward it back to the desk.
#2. Other employees have no idea what you do, and will try to pass the buck to you.
Exchange is down and you're a Network Admin? Well suddenly there's a network problem, certainly not a problem with the Exchange server. There's a network problem? Well then you're a Windows Admin and it's clearly your fault. No matter what they will always find a way to blame their problems on you.
#3. If you're doing your job well, they will fire you.
Congratulations, your systems stay up all the time, maintain themselves, and building a new system for your environment is such a painless and well-documented procedure it takes minutes and a monkey could do it. So we're hiring a monkey. Get out.
#4. If you're doing your job poorly, they will promote you.
#5. A crashed system holds many secrets, do not reboot it.
You need to find the source of the problem, or it will come back to haunt you. If you're fine with rebooting six times a day, be my guest.
#6. Backups are important, but multi-layered redundancy is the way to go.
Why have one webserver when you can have two? Why have one mailserver when you can have two? Have two locations? Why not have four mailservers? The more redundancy you have in your systems and your network, the less you have to care about midnight outages.
#7. If someone needs to tell you to be more polite, you have no business working in IT.
Seriously, you screwing up screws up everyone's day. You need to be meek, friendly, and try your best not to let everyone know you make more money than them. Except Sales and Marketing. They scoff at your puny salary.
#8. Always ask for a lot more than you need.
A big project require four servers? Ask for eight. Setting this up is going to take a week? Tell them it will take two. It never hurts to try to get a safe buffer, and you'll never get what you ask for anyway unless you're amazingly lucky. Either way, if you say it takes two weeks and you get it done in one, you look awesome. If you tell them it takes eight servers and they give you four, you look like a rock-star when you get it to work. If they give you the eight servers anyway...well...it looks like you have some spares for once.
#9. If it can't be done, say so.
Don't get yourself involved in an impossible project. Doing the impossible might be part of your job, but if you don't know OpenView and your manager wants OVO to be making his coffee in the morning, don't tell him you can make it happen.
#10. Always look for something to improve.
This is what most admins forget. An idle admin is a fired admin, and an idle admin eventually is a stale and clueless admin. Remember, your manager will never hate you for suggesting new projects, and for suggesting things can be done better, especially if it's free. I find when I'm sitting idle between projects there's nothing better than to give myself a project and FINISH it. There's nothing quite as nice as informing your manager that there's a better way to do something, and that you've already set it up.
I once worked in a place with a large testing lab. The computers and other electronics were on a UPS. The air conditioning wasn't.
Power failed one Friday evening.
What was found Monday morning is left as an exercise to the reader.
I went through three power supplies before I discovered the fact that I actually had a power cable that was going bad.
I used to work for a company that developed a very highly customized package for our customers, put it on the *NIX of their choice, and installed it in their data centers. Although based in the US, one customer, whose site I was working on, was in Basingstoke, England.
The client was (and probably still is) a hard-core Big Blue shop, so the *NIX of choice was AIX, running on a two-piece RS6K machine. One piece was the server itself, and the other piece was an 8-disc SSA drive tower.
The drive tower had three power supplies, allegedly for redundancy, but these, in turn, were connected together via a three-way IEC Y cable. This then plugged into a normal IEC cable that then had the monster 13A plug they use in the UK on the other end. (If you haven't seen one of these, they're huge. If we used these in the US, we'd probably rate them for 50A).
The plug had a fuse in it.
I'll say that again, because this is important, but not something that you typically see outside the UK: The plug had a fuse in it.
After we hardware guys left the customer site, and left it in the capable hands of our software guys, we got a frantic call from the software guys that the discs had "just disappeared from the system".
To make a long story short (if it's not too late for that), the fuse in the plug had blown, thus killing power to all three power supplies, in turn killing power to the discs. Once we figured that out, we had our software guys get the customer's IT guy on the phone, he got out two more IEC to 13A cords and a fuse, and the problem was fixed in ten minutes plus reboot time. The Y cable was relegated to the scrap heap.
www.wavefront-av.com
Users will most likely download useless applications (ex. apps that check weather, screensavers) no matter how many times they are told not to. I mean from where they get this you would think they could tell this stuff screams adware. Then when ask did you download anything on you computer before it started to have this problem, the answer is always no. Until of course you have to personally go down and fix the computer and they have to explain why this program was installed.
Note to self never mention Microsoft when posting on Slashdot!
You want to spot the real pro in the machine room he (or she) has a vacuum cleaner in one hand and a Brother p-touch in the other. I honestly beleive there is a direct linear relationship between the efficiency and uptime of a shop and how anal they are about labelling stuff. I want to open a front door of a rack and see every server's hostname and every removable media device clearly labelled. I know YOU know that that CD-ROM drive is drive D: on the frodo server but I ain't got time to try to figure that out. Even more importantly I similarly want EVERY cable in the back of the rack to have some kind of useful label on both ends (unless it is less than a foot long then just one end is OK).
I'm very good at what I do, not even 5% of my peers are as good as I am (admittedly I work on the helpdesk so the bar isn't necessarily too high in some cases). I know my stuff in a lot of detail (I'm a geek) and am usually the most intelligent person in any room I'm in. These are plain simple facts and even my employer wouldn't deny them, I am however (despite the seeming arrogance of the preceding statements) willing to learn and depressingly aware that I don't know everything (I generally find the more I learn the more I realise I don't know). I treat users as human beings and enjoy the problem solving parts of my job. Ok, so repairing an oversized .pst for the nth time is less than fun but I usually get all the difficult stuff no-one else knows what to do with. Fortunately my employer recognises this and my pay slip is suitably well padded. Getting someone with my level of knowledge who actually enjoys helpdesk work is worth the extra shekels to them, it means the systems and comms teams can get on with taking things forward while I make sure the current setup keeps ticking over.
Most users are perfectly capable of firing up a command line and following instructions if they're given clearly and unambiguously. Obviously you want to keep it simple (ipconfig, set etc) but it's the quickest way to get their IP address (assuming you don't have central login histories built in to your call logging software or it's not working).
This one makes me shudder. Repairing the damage done by those who went before me and rebuilding the permission structures ("user in the global, global in the local", it's not rocket science for crying out loud!) once the directory structure is sane (and incidentally only allowing list access to the root file share) has eaten up more of my time than I want to even think about.
And don't forget that accurate backup reporting is just as critical. Finding out the backup has failed the last 2 weeks and the software didn't report it is not something you ever want to go through (fortunately we also do manual checks). This is a sore point with me, one of those head->wall things I don't want to talk about.
This is the core of my job. I have to balance network integrity and security with user needs, frequently the "obvious" (to the user) solution is not acceptable in some way or other (wireless for example is an absolute no go area on our network) so I have to work out one that is. I'm here to enable users to achieve their tasks and goals, not to get in the way.
See above, it just doesn't happen on anything connected to the core network.
I can't stress enough how valuable one of these, or some other good LiveCD, can be. If the box is Windows, Linux, whatever, keep one handy. One of these things can be priceless if the thing refuses to boot properly, someone deleted NTLDR, X locks up on runlevel 5, your driver interrupts conflict, a recursive script uses all of the PIDs, or any number of problems. Keep a printout of the boot options for the disk, too, to boot the unbootable.
...wait at least 24 hours to read an email. Do not reply to any email until the sender has sent a follow-up email. Do not do any work until the requester asks his boss to talk to your boss about why you didn't respond to the service request.
I reckon this has most to do with approach... users, especially the non-techy variety, tend to approach things in the same casual way they approach TV, or writing a reprort... casually, and intuitively... we aren't like that, generally; geeks are methodical... every step we take is scripted, and we're analyzing what we're doing as we're doing it...
remember trying to get those first couple of computers to talk to each other when you were a kid? one of the things we learned from that was approach: mentally cataloging each step along the way so it could be duplicated later... we deal with most things (and *especially* troubleshooting things) with the scientific method *firmly* implanted at the front of our conciousness
when the dvd doesn't work right for the non-tech, it's probably error related, but they wouldn't know that, because they just did what *feels* right... our "aura" is our ability to approach things methodically
I've personally seen this happen all the time. Someone tells me "this doesn't work" and the moment I type the same command or push in the PCMCIA card myself or whatever, it suddenly works. We dubbed it the Proximity of Genius Effect and is similar to the following koan:
2-9 are generally just variations of #1.
Don't hang the hub by the cables, no matter how thick the ethernet and tiny and tiny the hub. Don't let 2m of cable hang from the switch on the high shelf down to the hole by the floor. It will work the first month or two, then will start to mysteriously fail. The most basic reason behind all these ports failing is that the cable puts stress on a port. Just attach all the cables half a meter away from the hub with ducttape or nails or staples or whatever, don't let them hang though, keep them loose, always leave at least minimal slack.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
"Linux may be powerful, but the command prompt and configuration files and filesystem obscurity will just as soon get you a pink slip if something goes wrong and no one knows how to fix it but yourself."
Contrast that with:"# 9 - Know Your Needs:
"This one could also be called 'Learn Linux.'...When you want a spam solution, before looking at $5,000 servers and huge licensing fees for Windows Server software take a look at one of those old 'junk' PCs you have in the closet, download your favorite distro of Linux, and install procmail and spamassassin. You (and your budget) will thank me later."
Ok...., so which is it?
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
>>I know this was said as a joke, but I see this a lot amongst the geek community, the attitude that users just don't know what they are doing, and that is why they can't make anything work.
The reason you see it so often is because it is so true. User is a broad term, and I use it as anyone who is touching the system aside from the administrators (bosses, subordinates, that monkey down the hall). I work as a sys admin in a lab at the university I am currently attending and the worse things happen because a user thinks they know what they are doing when they don't. Here are a few of my favorite examples.
In the defense of the user, those who "know" what they are doing often makes mistakes as well. My favorite example of this is when the IT office calls and tells me that I have a virus on my webserver and it opened a port that is getting a large amount of traffic. I was told to fix the problem immediately or my port would be shut off. Naturally I asked which port... the answer? Port 80. After a short technical explaination they agreed to leave my port alone if I would at least do a scan. I scanned with a few antivirus and spyware programs as well as looked at a hijackthis log. Surprise surprise, the system was clean
Alternative: Leave the password printed in big letters around. Let only the user know how to read it.
See topic of this post.
R:UTP,wm,bm!
Great password, isn't it?
Just look around the user's seat for texts. They are there. Posters, manuals, regulations, brand names, directions, manuals. Something the user always has around them. Pick first letters of the words, retain capitalization, include all the semigraphics, optionally include 1337sp33ch pieces if it seems too weak. Instruct the user how to use. "Here, this book cover. It spells out your password." They won't forget.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
2. Never use the user's keyboard -- see #1 and multiply by 10.
3. The user's keyboard usually contains items which did not stay in the user's mouth. Bring your own keyboard.
4. If hygenic input devices are not available, create a reason to work on the tower in your space where hygenic input devices are available.
5. If the system cannot be removed, engage the user. Make the user root/administrator thru remote interfaces; then direct the user thru the steps to correct the problem.
6. If you must use the user's input devices, maintain a supply of surgical scrub solutions in your personal toolkit.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
This might seem like an obvious one... but it's not. When a user complained about the password complexity requirements, when was the last time you told them about dictionary attacks? When a user complained that Internet Explorer told him the 'server' was down, did you explain what a server means in computer terms, or did you just send them off with a reassurance and a condescending pat?
Users are not stupid... they are ignorant. They don't understand why it is failing. They may even be very knowledgable, just not in the domain of the current problem.
While you're waiting for that reboot, why not explain to the user what you suspect the problem is, and why. When they get confused between their email address and their username, clarify and define the terms. When they put www in front of every URL, whether it should be there or not, explain about how hostnames are a custom, not a rule.
"Type email.example.com in the address bar at the top."
"It says host not found?"
"Read me the address bar, letter by letter..."
"http://www..."
"Hold right there... the address I gave was email.example.com. Not all websites begin with www, just most."
"Ahh, gotit, lemme retype it..."
"Hostnames are just names... we could have called it fluffy.example.com if we wanted, but that would be silly. *chuckle* Ok, now that you have that typed in..."
And hopefully that user will remember from then on that websites don't have to begin with www. They may even look at and notice the alternate hosts various sites use. They learned something, it took only a few seconds longer, and the user will hopefully know a little more about the background behind the stuff they are told to do.
If you take a few seconds out of every call to combat ignorance, pretty soon you'll start getting fewer calls. At the very least, the calls will be more tolerable because the user won't be making the same completely stupid mistakes over and over because they don't understand.
If every tech took a few seconds to combat ignorance, we could actually make a difference.
The Raven
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.