Bad sysadmin, no biscuit…
Sometimes in our community, it’s important to point out when people do the wrong thing. In the case of Sys Admins, who regularly get blasted by end users for not respecting them, sometimes we actually do the wrong thing. In this case, the Sys Admin who has been doing this for years should really know better. The behavior is called being a “Cowboy.” This is where a sysadmin makes a change to a system w/o letting other sysadmins know, or letting the users know that the change is being made. It’s really our responsibility to do the right thing and 1) ask first and 2) notify of the change in question.
I bring this up because recently, I had a sysadmin make a change to a production system. As minor as a change this was, it cause big problems. The change was made, admittedly by him, to a system that he knew nothing about, and it was made at 11pm on a Saturday night. This change caused the test system to “complain” about a service that it couldn’t test. Ultimately waking someone, who shouldn’t have been woken up. This ends up creating a “child who cries wolf syndrome”
It’s all about professionalism. When we as admins do anything that could affect someone else, we need to be clear about what it is, why we’re doing it, and make sure its a positive change.
Overheard at work “We need to hire sysadmins who look at this as a job, and not a gig”
