An other harrowing day at the office!
If you are a Systems Administrator in the Unix world there are thing that you have to accept, one of these things is that there are users that will drive you to distraction. I thought that I had accepted this fully, but today I was persuaded that I had just been kidding myself. The user in question (remember when you are a sysadmin everyone on the system except you is a user) managed to type in the command “rm * .tmp” in his home directory, he was greeted with the error message “.tmp not found” it would seem that the space between the “*” and the “.” changes the way the command works.  As he was a shell script writer and responsible for the deployment of new code, this seemed to be causing him some discomfort.

After a short conversation it was easy to see why, all the scripts that were required for the code deployment were in his home directory. Please note the use of the past tense here, it would seem that it was important.

In order to ease the pain and discomfort to the aforesaid user and to persuade him to take a little more care in the future, I agreed a modest fee – 1 Latte which I promptly threw over my desk. There is a lesson here, but I’m not sure that I can work out what it should be.

Still onward and upward was my thought after cleaning my desk, on with my own work for the day. Around the middle of the day I received an email from one of my colleagues asking about some software that I had apparently installed for her, after a couple of hours of pratting around I found out that I had indeed installed this software and eventually I worked out what to do with it. I carried on with my own tasks till the late afternoon, deciding I’d had enough of the whole thing I went home – purchasing two lottery tickets on the way. I’m hopeful that my next Blog post will be from Brazil or the Bahamas, but I’ll probably be back in the office tomorrow to see what else can go pear shaped!