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."

Comments

Tales of Sysadmin Hate

[Molt]

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.

Re:Why Your Sysadmin Hates You

[captbob2002]

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.

Re:Which is the most counterproductive act of all.

[HornWumpus]

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).