Oh God! That was real crazy and in-humane idea!

I know, management and the "resources" have their "differences" always. But, taking that on someone else is really not something to be appraised. How could anyone get away with this anyway?

Well, they did track back and tried pointing it back at him..but you know something really weird? The exact SAME time he was editing the crontab someone else was also editing it!! So this guy saved and exit and AFTER that the other guy quit and exit without saving! SO whatever changes he did the first time was overwritten and the fault was GENUINE. But to do that TWICE in two weeks!!!?? He wasn't fired but he left after 6 months of working, he didn't like the working culture there. They don't fire people for that, it was filed under "human-error"

---------- Post updated at 10:05 PM ---------- Previous update was at 10:00 PM ----------

He wasn't fired, was filed under "human error" because two people were editing it at a same time but the customer was duly compensated. This is just the kind of thing that happens on daily basis over there. He err'ed the first time I admit but I was suspicious when he err'ed again the following week.

---------- Post updated at 10:16 PM ---------- Previous update was at 10:05 PM ----------

..dont get me started on the 1st level support guy whom renamed a system to a single numeric value of "2" His excuse was that he wasn't aware what uname -S does in UNIX..last I checked he's still there

This is funny!!

With AIX-LPAR and all, your's must be a very big and so procedure oriented organisation. So you really have two approaches. One described earlier. ie. Do but dont tell anyone, take care etc.

The other : talk about it to end users, see how you can repeat it again for their benefit. ie. see to it that you become the end users' goto person for problem resolution. Then with your favourite user, try to wangle a seat in a meeting with the authorised vendor and so on. spread your wings man (or woman).

For your information, a recent article I read says that in future more and more IT persons will be away from core IT departments and get embedded in end user departments as co-ordinators, implementors and so on. As and when this happens in your organisation (ie downsizing, out sourcing) you can make the jump.

OK

I thought the original thread title was more appropriate.

Yea, I also thought "Prize of Being an Admin" v. "Price of Being an Admin" conveyed the original posters feelings. (Reverted back to "Prize")

Well, in my last project i had such a colleague too: Once, the storage guy (also an AIX expert) wanted to do some performance tests. He created an empty LUN, imported it as hdisk device and wrote to this device directly using dd . His point was to not let the file system drivers mess up his measurement.

So far, so logical and absolutely correct. Now, enter the idiot: he saw what the storage guy did and us discussing the results. Three days later a productive system broke with some strange errors and was unable to boot again. The disks in the rootvg were damaged to an extent that even the PVID and the LVCB (partition information) were missing. It transpired, that he did "performance tests" too. But because he didn't really understand what the storage guy was doing, he didn't get himself a new and empty disk for that, but used the system disk to overwrite the first physical GB with hexadecimal zeros. Well, the disk was mirrored and the system would have survived that - but doing thorough work he did it on the second system disk too. Guess what happens, when both copies of a mirrored disk are destroyed.

We would have been able to restore the system pretty quickly using an mksysb from our central NIM server - unfortunately he had used not only the production system but this very system, our centralized software repository for all the AIX systems - for his "performance tests" too (along with a couple of other systems, but we found that out later). Most systems boot only very slowly from nulled out boot disks....

This guy is there in in systems administration for more then ten years now and this was not even the first time he did something this idiotic. Go figure.

bakunin