Re: Is this Recovery? Doesn't feel like it.
- From: orc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (david parsons)
- Date: 23 Jul 2007 21:03:45 -0700
In article <slrnfa4tde.luf.qnaprfjvgupebjf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
The Flying Guinea Pig <qnaprfjvgupebjf@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Then recently, one of the new hires (who I *thought* had a brain) told
me that I was not going to be the de facto sysadmin any longer. "I've
decided that the new mailserver will be running MSexchange. And we've
got a consulting firm to run it and all of our IT operations," he said.
Hee. I'm in the same boat at a place I used to sysadmin for; when
they got big enough to require a full time sysadmin, I was moved
into maintaining the dns and doing mail consluting and got to watch
the steady stream of bofhs going in, doing their job, and getting
fired because they weren't brown-nosing enough.
Eventually they got a brownnoser, and then the real fun began.
They decided that being two minors downstream was Too Old for
s*ndm**l, and rolled it up to the bleeding edge.
"be careful with the s*ndm**l.cf file, because we've tweaked it
for our network and it might explode if you just drop it in
without rebuilding it."
No answer, but a few days later there came, in quick succession,
"We're going to roll up to the latest version now!", followed,
about 90 minutes later, with "HELP! ALL OF THE MAIL IS BOUNCING!"
So (at hourly rates, ho ho!) I installed the most current s*ndm**l
on a local machine, rolled up the config file, and everything worked.
"That's funny", I said, "I'd better have a look at the system because
I can't reproduce the problem here."
It turned out that when they updated s*ndm**l, they just used a
default config file out of the tarball, so all of the spiffy routing
and +group redirect code that the company had been using for the
past 14 years just wasn't there anymore.
When I told them that it wasn't working because they didn't migrate
the config files, they said it was my fault since the dns should do
all of the routing and redirecting by itself.
The stupid, it is very profitable. 40 hours of billable time isn't
much, but it's not often that I get paid for yelling at milspec
idiots. (And it's probably not going to be just 40 hours, because
they're trying to take over the dns and will, no doubt, be (giggle)
trying to make it handle the routing all by itself.)
What pisses me off the most is that *no one ever talked to me about
this*. I know more about running the boxes and keeping the users' mail
running, necessary services up, hardware fixed, and spam blocked than
anyone else--and yet my opinion was not asked.
Of course not. They want to prove to their management that they can
do it all by themselves, without being tainted by the failed
policies of the past. (In my case, the failed policies of the past
include them trying to set up *completely* *new* dns servers,
because the existing ones are tainted by contact with the old dns.
The new dns servers are, of course, redundant servers that all live
on virtual machines on one physical box. But it's a Dull box, so it
will never have any hardware failures.)
These are also the people who replaced a dedicated firewall
appliance with a PC running Qrovna Yvahk because they couldn't
figure out how to work the appliance's web interface.
____
david parsons \bi/ Hand me my marshmallows.
\/
.
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