Now anyone who has ever been to the West Coast of Scotland in the summer months will be familiar with the dreaded midge, these are in fact found in several parts of the world – but go under different names in each of them. A dictionary definition describes them as – any of various small biting flies: midges; biting midges; black flies; sand flies. In the main one doesn’t even know that they are there until after they have gone, in North America they are referred to as “Noseeums” – very apt name if I may say so. This should serve as a warning to anyone considering a trip to one of the places that these little critters can be found, or more to the point – where the little critters can find you! You may have some skewed perspective here, like “Oh I’m never bothered by midges” – well you may not be directly. But it is almost certain that someone in your party will be and they will bemoan the fact to you, thus here we are – you too have been affected by the general moaning of someone else courtesy of the midge!
Now when drawing a comparison between the user and a midge, the first thing to be aware of is that if you stay in one place for any length of time they will find you! The second thing in this comparison is that both the User and the Midge can bite you and you won’t even know – well not till a little later when you come up in unsightly lumps. The third thing to be aware of is that no matter how effective the countermeasures put in place to combat them, they will always find a way through your defenses.
Now to place this fully into some form of perspective that relates to systems administration, one has to understand that everyone that uses a system – with the exception of a systems admin is a user. So when you find that you have a system with 15,000 accounts and around 10 systems admin accounts, you have to recognise that there are 14,990 accounts that will cause problems at one time or an other and that there are a further 10 accounts that have the ability to cause big problems however this generally happens because you have on the systems admin team a “altus solvit excors”. So it’s better if we just stick with the 14,990 user accounts for the time being. The example I’m going to cite is in this ball park, some changes were made to the system, simple changes really – a new password agent was rolled out, in this case not by a systems admin I might add and all the accounts that had a password older than 13 weeks stopped working – leaving everything to fail as the batch and ftp user accounts used to have non expiring passwords. No one is quite sure what has happened, so I’m putting it down to the midge effect – but than I think that it may have been a user as well.