[TriLUG] How not to run a network

[Jeff Groves]

One thing that came to mind as a possible solution is to catch the system admins when they 
break their own rules (and they will) and raise all kinds of hell about it.

Jeff G.


William Sutton wrote:
> 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

-- 
Law of Procrastination:
         Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has
         the feeling that there is nothing important to do.