Various masturbatory acts of systems administration

[Mike Van]

In a recent thread, I spoke of reinstalling Eclipse whenever a problem arises as an act of "masturbatory systems administration whose only real intent is to make the sysadmin.." (in that case the end-user) "...feel like they were useful."

Please post other stories of masturbatory acts of systems administration that we'll find amusing. Credit yourself with one beer token for each story we find amusing.

Please keep it <= PG.
[ August 11, 2006: Message edited by: Mike Van ]

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

I had a "UNIX sysadmin" working for me for a very short while who had come in from the Windows world. Maybe she was an MCSE or something. Anyway, the only real solution to everything on Windows -- at least in those days, things are better now, I'll admit -- was to reboot, and if that didn't work, wipe the disk and reinstall the OS. So this was her proposed solution for UNIX stuff too, which, if you know anything about UNIX systems, is pretty absurd. We started looking for her replacement the very first time she proposed this as a remedy for some little problem or another.

Anyway, to this day, sometimes somebody will point out that our server's clock is lagging, or /tmp is filling up, or some other little thing, and another guy will say "reboot, and if that don't work, wipe the disk and reinstall" and we'll all fall about the place laughing for a while.

[Peter Rooke]

Worked with a senior analysis, who would create new (UNIX) users. A script had been created to help, however for each user the (poor) guy would then have to issue a �passwd <username>� command. There were four machines, he would do this for each machine. On average there were fifty new users each week

Bit of fun GNU: "Know your System Administrator"

[marc weber]

On Macs, the requisite cure-all is "Repair permissions."

(Uh... Not that Macs ever have a problem, of course.)

[Robbi Palacios]

We had a sysadmin before who was always complaining especially if
he does overtime. Whenever we need to put our program into
production, he always complained overtime hinders his ability to
procreate. He told us our work indirectly makes him senile.

[Anand Prabhu]

A few years back, we had this Unix admin consultant who would download any file from Unix like /etc/passwd etc, modify them in Notepad and transfer them back. Of course when the senior admin realized this and the fact that he had very little clue about vi, his contract was done.