[TriLUG] How not to run a network

[William Sutton]

Humm.  I wonder if some of the tech bigwigs at my company have been 
reading the same M$ glossies that your .edu friends have been reading.  We 
recently had a number of firm and unalterable decrees on the subject of IT 
policy sent out, some of which were not particularly well thought out:
- no downloading software from the internet (we do all know that the 
internet isn't trustworthy, right?  by the way, if I do Perl development 
for the company, does that mean my job is now outlawed?)
- no installing software unless it comes on a shrinkwrapped CD from a 
vendor with whom we have licensed the software (yeah, now how about 
running those Microsoft updates that my PC wants me to do?)
- no embedded account/password combinations in plaintext in programs 
(wait...just about every program we have ftp's a report to a client 
somewhere...are they going to allocate time/money/resources to bring the 
existing infrastructure into compliance?)
- no external IM clients...use the corporate IM server with the corporate 
IM client (no file transfer capability)
- any files with extensions (it seems) other than .txt or .dat are banned 
from email attachments (but you can rename them to .dat if you like...)

**major frustration**

This isn't even just about blaming virii for everything.  This is about 
people (dare I say, microserfs?) who believe that anything that can't be 
administered with a few mouse clicks is somehow black magic, and suspect 
at that, and the fact that they admin with a few mouse clicks somehow 
confers upon them wisdom and knowledge equal to their perceived admin 
power.

It seems that while Microsoft has succeeded in dumbing down the system 
administration process on their servers, that a correlating trend has been 
overlooked:  the dumbing down of Microsoft admins.

Is there a solution for this sort of ignorance?

William