Slashdot Mirror
Why Your Sysadmin Hates You
jfruh writes "We've learned many lessons in the fallout from Edward Snowden's whistleblowing and flight to Hong Kong, but here's an important one: Never make your sysadmin mad. Even if your organization isn't running a secret, civil-rights violating surveillance program, you're probably managing to annoy your admins in a number of more pedestrian ways that might still have blowback for you. Learn to stay on their good side by going along with their reasonable requests and being specific with your complaints."
I'd like to see those sysadmin having a problem with their checks and being told "no no, you can't talk to anyone in HR or the payroll department directly, are you crazy? Please open a ticket and wait for a reply, an intern will get back to you in 24 hours or less".
We have a system like that. Works quite well, actually, because I do not need to know who exactly in HR or payroll to talk to. Saves me time, saves them time and I get my problems fixed.
The only time I had a sysadmin hate me it was more due to me documenting their dangerous incompetence.
After a security hole was found in our multi-million daily users web application I was given a project to look into other potential security issues with the application. After trying SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and other fun stuff I started to poke into the application server it was running on, and a quick read through the documentation told me how to get diagnostic information from the system- unless it's been disabled as part of the standard installation process. I try it on my dev server, and get the info- not a problem. I try it on the test server and it's the same. I then try the staging server, which should be a copy of the live service, and start to get scared.
After a quick chat with my manager as I wanted to be covered should the system flag me as an attacker I try it on the live service from an external IP address, again the diagnostics appear. I now had our database schema, the network architecture of the live service, and a lot of configuration details. My manager, who'd been watching over my shoulder as they'd become curious now, suggested we test this properly. I used my non-work mobile and called the sysadmin and, using only the details on screen, convinced him I was a database admin from elsewhere in the company working off-site. He was very helpful, I soon had a nicely unofficial SSH tunnel into the network set up for me, a temporary user account on all of the live servers, and root access to the live database with all of our customer details.
Oddly enough the sysadmin didn't think it fair that we'd 'tricked' him, and said that no one would normally see that information and think to do what I'd just done.
Most sysadmins I've worked with have been very good, and the in-department one I'm working with at the moment is absolutely amazing. It's not the case with all sysadmins though, some of them don't need users running random software as root to make things go stupid.
404 Not Found: No such file or resource as '.sig'
The worst characteristics of Sysadmins tend to emerge when the organization treats them badly.
I yet to have an employer who treats sysadmins badly.
And if you treat admins well or very well, the IT becomes a money sink hole, with admins generally caring about their own problems. They feel like they own the whole IT infrastructure and can do with it whatever they want, not giving a single fuck about people who do the actual work of the company on that infrastructure. (Hey! ITs often don't even know what company actually does!!) Oh, and when some problem gets really escalated by the employees, IT often makes sure that the meeting is held only with the managers, who can't refute their "arguments." After all, the stereotypical manager can be always convinced with the unbeatable irrefutable argument "if we do that, the Exchange server might break!"
IMO, the stereotypes appear not because admins go bad in toxic environments. But because IT often degenerates into a self-centered parallel universe of its own, what eventually de-evolves into the toxic environment.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
My problem is not just SysAdmins, but the entire IT department.
I'm a software developer (actually, supervisor of a software development team) at a large multinational that isn't explicitly a software development company. Most people on our network require access to deal with Microsoft Office, our SAP system and a few random databases of stuff with web front ends. Because this is what 'most' employees need, our IT can be strongly against requests that go outside of this.
For doing my job (writing software), I require a Windows system with Administrator rights. This would not be allowed on our corporate network due to policy rules (okay, I get this) so I am a part of a separate network for doing this. However, in order to read my email, I ALSO have to have a computer on our corporate network. One extra box sitting on my desk purely for reading and replying to email. I could use our webmail, but it's pretty cumbersome. When I asked if they could set up IMAP access so I could get rid of the pointless extra box on my desk, the answer was that IMAP is a security hole and for policy reasons, they won't do so.
A part of my job is writing software for mobile devices. In order to test on real devices, I need wireless access. Policy states that no wireless device can be set up other than by IT. IT refuses to touch anything on my separate network; but STILL enforced the policy that if I set up wireless, I'd be getting a very stern talking to by the HR department. Eventually it got sorted, but not before management stepped in due to project delays caused by me and my team only being able to do real device testing AT HOME...
When I decided that my team needed better mouses and keyboards since I myself was noticing some hand strain, I put an order in to our system. Management approved the purchase and it was all fine. IT then blocked it saying that they supply our standard equipment from Dell and we shouldn't be ordering IT equipment separately. It was only after several days of arguing back and forth that they let the purchase order go through on grounds that since it's for my 'separate network' it's not counted as "IT equipment". That also means though that my development PC has a nice mouse and keyboard; but the one I use for email still has a really crappy thing supplied by our IT department and can never change.
I don't have so much to truly complain about, since I do get what I want/need eventually, but from my point of view, they do get in the way of us doing our jobs far more than they help. And I do understand their reasoning - we're a special case and they do a fine job for the other 99% of the company who don't have our requirements. I just wish they'd be a bit more open to working with us instead of actively fighting against us at every turn.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
too true. I had an tech that worked for me as both a student and as a regular employee. He had the patience of Job when working with end users. He would listen to them and work hard to understand what they were saying, what they wanted, what their problem was even when they really couldn't articulate it themselves. He went that extra mile to make folks happy....but without enabling bad behavior - he was good at nudging folks in the proper direction. He was a tenacious troubleshooter, wanted to know the root cause of a problem and how to prevent it, not just a quick fix or a work-around. I could throw anything at him, and let him run with it. And he did it all with a smile, but was not a pushover for the users.
told you that to tell you this
The layoff scythe swept across our college and he was mowed-down. He did find a position in the University's central IT department. It was hoped by some that his work ethic and attitude would improve central IT support...and it did for a time, but the corrosive environment, infighting, and court intrigue has ground him down. To say that he is still a damn-sight better than the rest of their staff would be damning with faint praise, but he still is. He is also more BOFH than the excellent worker I sent over there.
Wasn't the end users that broke him, was the brain-dead management and sheer laziness and incompetence of his "colleagues" that did it.
Watch when we spend six hours fixing a machine somebody botched horribly because we told them to push button A then button B then button C, but they pushed button B then button A then button C. For the third time.
I despise this. Whoever designs these systems to be so fragile that they break if you don't use them in a very specific order is the problem. There are certainly some dumb users out there, but there are even more dumb systems which are completely unhelpful.
People need to learn to take time to make things easy, accessible, and fool-proof. Design for the user, not the engineer.
After all the engineers looked at the psych departments ratio (1/ratio of the engineering school) and choose psych as our 'liberal arts focus area' the psych department asked the engineering department to stop.
We were blowing the curve for the first 3 psych courses, scaring off actual psych majors and treating the classes as dating pools. We had not yet learned to not stick our dicks into crazy (they don't get any crazier then psych majors).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'