UNIX System Administration Handbook - Evi Nemeth [476]
% mail boss I like my new job, everyone is so helpful, thank you. Working here for you will be really fun ...
The boss read the mail and responded with a jokingly rude and sexist remark about the size of her breasts. Other folks responded about the need to put a carriage return between the name of the recipient and the message itself. It seems “everyone” was an alias for all employees.
A few hours later, the head sysadmin (who by that time had seen both the secretary’s message and the boss’s response) got a call from the boss. The boss explained that he had made a mistake (R instead of r , perhaps) and needed copies of the message removed from everyone’s mailbox—with “everyone” being several thousand employees. Needless to say, the sysadmin refused. A moral decision was unnecessary: removing a message from thousands of mailboxes spread all around the world is an impossible task.
Dan, your new name is Lester
This story comes from a medium-sized company in the United States. They have thousands of employees and several locations. The commercial email program that they use has a name lookup feature that resolves the names of email recipients as you type them on the To line.
A new director of human resources, whose last name was something like Smith-Foo, was frantic because sensitive email that was supposed to be going to her was being received by a sales person named Foo Jones. It seems that the people (yes, there were more than one) sending her these messages would just type Foo on the To line and not check to see to whom the name resolved. All of this started happening during a time at which the company was being reorganized and people were being laid off. Most of the sensitive messages contained information regarding the layoffs.
The resulting political fallout had many managers scrambling to “fix” the “problem.” Meetings were held and experts were consulted. One manager even promised to rename Foo Jones to something else in the company’s databases. Just when the sysadmins thought that no one had any concept of reality, the IT manager stepped in and declared it a user-training issue. Finally, the users who sent email to the wrong person were trained to actually look to see where their messages were going before pushing the send button.
Which ones to fire
A novice sysadmin and an operator trainee discovered how to break into the Computing Center’s student computers. These hosts were run by a different group that was somewhat looked down on for being too conservative. The rookies wanted to leave a back door. As they were about to edit the /etc/passwd file, a senior sysadmin advised them to use vipw instead of vi . The novices never used the back door, but the senior sysadmin did and was caught. Who should be fired?
Our answer would be either all three, or just the senior sysadmin, who should have stopped the break-in when he became aware of it instead of aiding and abetting the installation of a back door. However, in this case the senior sysadmin was deemed too valuable to lose; the two rookies were fired instead.
We view this as a very bad management decision. If the limits of behavior are set by an employee’s value rather than by a written policy that is consistently enforced, the company is vulnerable to litigation (to say nothing of disgruntled employees with assault rifles).
Horndog Joe
Joe, a new sysadmin at a major computer manufacturer, was infatuated with the receptionist and asked her out for a date. She always went out with newcomers once, to show them around and welcome them to the area. Joe asked her out again but she refused. A week or so later, she mentioned to one of the senior sysadmins that the machine always told her she had new mail even when she didn’t. Hmmm. The senior sysadmin checked log files and found that Joe was reading the receptionist’s mail. What should he do?
• Fire Joe?
• Give him a strong talking to?
• Give him a mild talking to?
• Nothing?
The right answer