Reply to post: Re: There's a Terry Pratchett Quote for That...

Not exactly the kind of housekeeping you want when it means the hotel's server uptime is scrubbed clean

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: There's a Terry Pratchett Quote for That...

We had just bought first large Unix server and were in the process of preparing it for handover to the shift operators. It came with a menu system which gave access to all sysadmin functions. Shift ops had been given minimal training, just enough to take backups, start and stop the server and get the print spooler running so I wanted to modify the menu to restrict access to just these functions for them, My PHB didn't want me to put a sysadmin on the task as it would 'wasted days of an expensive resources time'. whilst you could add a new item or amend an item name easily, restricting access was going to require some real coding. to prove a point my sysadmin added an item called 'Don't press this button ever it will wipe the server'.

We briefed the ops, told them it would initiate a factory reset and the backups would be no good and left them to it.

We got through one day shift. 20 minutes into the evening shift it logged the fact that it had been activated.

Needless to say all the button did was log the event and tell the operator to inform us who had pressed the button.

When we grilled the two ops the following evening sure enough 'Bill' admitted that he had pressed it 'to see if it would really wipe the server' as he didn't believe we would leave something like that available.

Higher up the menu was a very piss poor recovery option which would assume there was a tape inserted in the drive with a tar file containing a backup. If he had pressed that option it would have copied the contents of the empty tape over the disk. I did then get a sysadmin to write a new menu so the ops could issue the commands they needed which were properly packaged, contained confirmation requests checked the state of the system before shutdowns etc. and we spent some time skilling up the ops on how different Unix was to the mainframes they were currently operating and how much less secure and resilient it was at the time.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon