Sysadmins - What's in Your MOTD?

permaculture asks: "This is a 'knowledge management' issue, on a University network. For many years we've had a network 'Message of the Day' that appears when any network user logs in. MOTD lists planned service outages for maintenance, progress on current issues, upcoming holidays, and other items that affect network users. Recently, this has been replaced by a page that announces general University business such as Open weeks, upcoming awards etc. There's a link on the page to the network MOTD that used to greet every user immediately after login. Does your network have a 'Message of the Day' that appears at login? Is it a Corporate business page, entirely related to network services, or something else entirely?"

Comments

Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is definitely a topic that merits serious discussion.
I use fortune.

NiN

[Anonymous Coward]

head like a hole
black as your soul
I'd rather die
than give you control

why bother, people don't read

[Gothmolly]

And if they do read, they don't care. If you tell them that Friday at 3pm, the a server is going down, they'll ignore it, and call you at 3:01 screaming that they are kicked off.

People don't care about your silly technical problems, they've learned that screaming loudly works, as it does. They don't care that you had to reboot the mail server because Exchange died again, goddammit, they have important email to send, what are you, incompetent?

And, your boss will kiss their ass and make excuses for your failures, and discuss grand schemes to Make Sure It Doesn't Happen Again.

Yes, I work at $LARGE_US_BANK, and this sort of thing does happen. Technologists are only ever the reason that people can't get work done, we're never seen as enablers.

Why do you think the BastardOperatorFromHell is such a powerful meme?

Re:why bother, people don't read

[Anonymous Coward]

. They don't care that you had to reboot the mail server because Exchange died again, goddammit, they have important email to send, what are you, incompetent?

Yes, you are incompetent.

I haven't rebooted the mail server for my company for 3 years now when it was moved from one datacenter to another (and even there, the new one was brought and we waited for DNS caches to flush before the old one was taken down).
Use something other than Exchange, and something other than whatever you're running exchange on and you won't have that problem.

(or was that supposted to be a rhetorical question)

Re:Sarbox Bites

[grudgelord]

I've seen SOX blamed for some amazing things (in my last CEO's quarterly analyst call, he blamed SOX for poor profit despite strong revenue) -- but never yet restrictions on what to put in the MOTD!!!!

This is poo.

Most likely this particular complaint stems from the costs associated of external auditors in the auditor independance clause, redesign in compliance with the PCAOB internal controls proceedures, and overall cost of implementation under 404. However, if all this is done correctly, after initial compliance cost, the only significant cost should be the recurring cost of an external auditing team, which should be a drop in the bucket when weighed against a publicly traded company's revenue and can be justified as nothing more than an operations cost. Now this is dejour versus defacto of couse. In a perfect world...

No, it's not cheap, but to blame a poor revenue to profit margin on SOX is a load. Besides, if the CEOs weren't lying, cheating, and stealing to begin with then they'd never have gotten SarbOxed in the head to begin with. They made their bed...

Back to the topic, SOX shouldn't have any direct effect on the ability to update a MOTD but various security restrictions can make it difficult for some "Administrators" to do their job due to limited rights and its possible that the MOTD (and more vital functions) to one of these. This of couse indicates piss-poor design in need of reevaluation, which of course spells additional cost of reimplementation. Thus your CEOs whining.

But that's just my take in it. Far be it from me to actually understand anything that emerges from the minds of executive management.