Always remember that.

You have a long history of being a trickster. I am curious which you are most proud of/which was your favorite.

I guess I am desensitized... I realize this is a pharmaceutical company, but this is all very standard behavior in the tech support / call center world. I've seen this sort of thing since 1998, so it really isn't that new to me. In both cases it sounds like management is being asked to predict productivity and deliverables based on time. Is your job function serial in nature at all? Does someone have to do something to a product before its passed to you and do you pass it to someone after that?

You are going to find two types of techs throughout your career.

* The Career-Person:

Is there to punch a time card and collect a paycheck
Learns only what is necessary to do the job
Probably received a classroom education on tech
Goes home and complains about not having enough free time to socialize

* The Enthusiast:

Loves technology and loves getting paid for working with it
Is constantly researching new technology even if it doesn't have to do with work
Could either have a degree our self taught education
Goes home and hacks on/fiddles with some sort of tech

With commercial support, if and when you find a bug in the distribution, you have the means and leverage to have the bug fixed and possibly interim workarounds.

I don't see why you cannot properly scale Sudo via LDAP: http://www.gratisoft.us/sudo/man/1.8.1/sudoers.ldap.man.html I also believe some of the functionality described by the article can be achieved via the Plugin API introduced in Sudo 1.8.1: http://www.gratisoft.us/sudo/man/1.8.1/sudo_plugin.man.html

Fedora has components to help manage large deployments. https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/ It also has FreeIPA to help with a secure and scalable means of managing authentication/authorization/resources within the cluster. http://freeipa.org/page/Main_Page

http://pki.fedoraproject.org/wiki/PKI_Main_Page