System Administration

Answering the Call to Duty

What does it mean to be on call?

Does it mean you have a beeper? A cell phone? What's your response time?

Having only a pager is next to useless. You know that someone wants you, but you don't know for what. Have you tried to find a pay-phone lately? What if you're driving? (NOTE: paging more than once in a 10-minute period will result in the pager being thrown across the room.)

Having a text pager is an improvement, but still pretty much useless. You know that someone wants you, you know for what, but you don't have a means of letting that person know that the problem is insignificant. And so you receive page after futile page.

Having a cell phone is a vast improvement. You can receive messages, even text messages, and you can respond. If you leave it on.

Companies which issue only pagers to their staff don't have on-call support.

3:47:49 PM # Google It!
categories: System Administration

Mis-appropriation of Company Resources

What is that screeching sound? It seems that some administrators are shocked, shocked to discover unplanned use of Groove on their internal networks. [Stephen Dulaney via Jon's Radio]

Does the BOFH need to give someone a good LARTing upside the head? Some IT organizations do not understand what their role is.

Note to the Mistaken: If you don't want users installing software, don't grant them administrative privileges on their workstations. Enjoy the rise in support calls that results, and congratulate yourself on securing your job.

11:44:08 AM # Google It!
categories: System Administration