The case of the 500-mile email
November 25, 2008
This is a great story about someone who had a user who couldn't email anyone over 500 miles away.
This is why being a sysadmin can drive people crazy.
Posted in General
Standalone Sysadmin
A blog for IT Admins who do everything by an IT Admin who does everything
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Hi! I'm Matt Simmons, author of the Standalone Sysadmin blog. I've been a small infrastructure administrator since aound 2001, nearly always on my own, hence the "Standalone Sysadmin" title. This year, I started working at Northeastern University's College of Computer and Information Science, so I'm getting a taste of a larger environment,but it's still small in the grand scheme of things, but I'll be passing along this new experience as I go through it! I started this blog in May of 2008 and have thoroughly enjoyed every interaction I've had because of it. Thank you for visiting!-
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November 26th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
LOL, nice! At that campus, they obey the laws of physics.
November 26th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
As they would say over at thedailywtf.com, the real WTF here is that the sysadmin left his binary in a place that standard patching tools could overwrite it.
Granted, this took place a long time ago when that was sometimes considered a "good practice". But, people still do it because they think it makes things cleaner.
That is a bad assumption for two reasons.
First, you end up like this poor guy and have a serious headache of a problem, or something much worse. At least in this case he got a very amusing story out of it.
Second, doing this creates a system that is non-obvious and not discoverable, both things sysadmins should avoid like the plague. These are the issues that drive us to drink...although that can be its own reward at times.
This is just a long winded way of saying that /usr/local is there for a reason and sooner or later we should all learn that reason.