Zeriel's Journal: For the record...a study in why your sysadmin hates you

Annoyance is when a machine pages due to full hard disk at 2:30AM.

Irritation is when a second machine pages due to full hard drive at 4:45AM.

Anger is when a third machine crashes utterly at 6:15AM, and said machine is the main processing machine for the main revenue-generating business unit, and it can't be remote-rebooted so you have to go in to work to kick it.

Seething anger is when you subsequently have to go in to work at 8AM anyway because your boss can't concieve of not having a sysadmin in the building for a few hours during the workday.

Rage is when the office is subsequently out of hot chocolate, and there's nothing but cheap decaf coffee and donuts your diet won't let you have.

Incoherent rage is when the guys leave for lunch without getting a pickup order from you, despite knowing that with the other sysadmin away, it's policy that I'm not allowed to leave the building even for lunch during my shift.

Blind, fearsome, total hatred is when the development team blithely returns the Visual C++ CD that's been the one black spot on your software license audit for EIGHTEEN MONTHS, after claiming all this time they were clueless as to it's location, when it was apparently sitting in the CD drive of the dev server they don't let IT touch.

Now someone hosed their Windows XP machine and they want me to nuke the OS from orbit to be sure it's fixed, despite the fact that it's broken because they insisted on not letting me handle the install the first time around.

I'm going to be getting the sledgehammer out of the maintenance closet very damn soon now.

You're just going to have to...

[TechnoLust]

kill one as an example to the others.

I've identified your problem

[gmhowell]

The sledgehammer should not be locked away in a closet. In an IT job, all HR and other 'humon' problems should look to you like a railroad spike.

John Henry was a steel drivin' man...

Moo

[Chacham]

Clearly delineate lines. You can only respect therm, if they espect you.

Answer.

[Talinom]

Lart the fuckers. Disable the CD drive so they can't install their own software (password protecting it at the bios level is usually good enough). If they insist on installing their own OS then they should be responsible for the administration of the machine. Period. Next subject.

After installing their system correctly, image it so when it goes boom it takes you 20 minutes to bring it back from the dead. Spend the other 7 hours and 40 minutes at the bar drinking the pain away.

Batch files are still you

Re:Answer.

[Zeriel]

Oh, we have a severe ticketing system that weeds out the most ridiculous stuff.

And my problem isn't temp dirs, man, it's the fact that we literally process through ~10-20GB of new unique incoming data PER DAY here.

The one crash, that woulda been no problem if it hadn't been the third page of the day.

Most of my problem is people creating random scripts that dump data around at inopportune times, and there's nothing I can do to prevent that, policy-wise, except on a very few servers (about 1/4 of them) tha