Monday, June 29th, 2009
From work just now:
Developer: “I need root access!!”
Me: … talktalktalk
Developer: “Ok, so I need read access on that system logfile!”
Me: … talktalktalk
Developer: “Oh. I need to know how to redirect the output of a command to a file.”
Me: “Sure! I’ll send you mail with a cut and paste it from a place where you’ve already done the same thing. Have a great day!”
Quoting from the Monkeybagel Document:
SYSADMIN: I used to provide system support for a team of database administrators. One time, out of the blue, for no apparent reason, they called up a senior vice-president and told him that they needed root access to all of our servers so they could run the ‘ls’ command and if they didn’t get that permission then nobody in the company would get paid that month. In the end I had to tell them that if they ever had the need, they could call me at any time, day or night, and I would at that time tell them the root password. They agreed and were happy. They called the first night and used the password to set up a porn site on our firewall. I shut the site down and notified our security guys. I got fired when our security guys found out I’d given out the password over the phone and reasoned that the database people wouldn’t have been that obvious so it must have been a Russian hacker. So let us now return to the matter at hand, about which I have only one question: What kind of pickles?