Managing Geeks Post: 302380868

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The Lounge What is on Your Mind? Managing Geeks Post 302380868 by Corona688 on Wednesday 16th of December 2009 11:45:04 AM

12-16-2009

Registered User

I can't say I agree with that wholeheartedly, but I do agree with this:

Quote:

Most IT pros support an organization that is not involved with IT. The primary task of any IT group is to teach people how to work. That's may sound authoritarian, but it's not. IT's job at the most fundamental level is to build, maintain and improve frameworks within which to accomplish tasks. You may not view a Web server as a framework to accomplish tasks, but it does automate the processes of advertising, sales, informing and entertaining, all of which would otherwise be done in other ways. IT groups literally teach and reteach the world how to work. That's the job.

When you understand the mission of IT, it isn't hard to see why co-workers and supervisors are judged severely according to their abilities to contribute to that process. If someone has to constantly be taught Computers 101 every time a new problem presents itself, he can't contribute in the most fundamental way. It is one thing to deal with that from a co-worker, but quite another if the people who represent IT to the organization at large aren't cognizant of how the technology works, can't communicate it in the manner the IT group needs it communicated, can't maintain consistency, take credit for the work of the group members, etc. This creates a huge morale problem for the group. Executives expect expert advice from the top IT person, but they have no way of knowing when they aren't getting it. Therein lies the problem.

As a minor example I'm often instructed to put folks into the senior staff group so they can access files senior staff has stored for them. But it is not necessary to give junior interns read-write access to the most deeply secured files on our intranet. If senior staff would just store less-restricted files in less-restricted folders(again, laid out to their specifications, and heavily documented down to immutable "read me" files in all base folders) this would be unnecessary. I'm continually put on the spot and must seem like a stuffy, paranoid jackbooted enforcer, but when I explain the extent of the damage that could be done by accident with needlessly broad access, my manger's always forced to agree.

It's of course not always like this. I'm happy to say they're gradually getting the idea. Still I clearly understand the sentiment... For IT's systems to operate correctly, and no matter how closely we try and model them to the users' needs, the acknowledgment and cooperation of both users and management is needed whether any of us like it or not.

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

history

HISTORY(5)							File Formats Manual							HISTORY(5)

NAME

       history - record of current and recently expired Usenet articles

DESCRIPTION

       The file /var/lib/news/history keeps a record of all articles currently stored in the news system, as well as those that have been received
       but since expired.  In a typical production environment, this file will be many megabytes.

       The file consists of text lines.  Each line corresponds to one article.	The file is normally kept sorted in the order  in  which  articles
       are  received,  although  this  is not a requirement.  Innd(8) appends a new line each time it files an article, and expire(8) builds a new
       version of the file by removing old articles and purging old entries.

       Each line consists of two or three fields separated by a tab, shown below as 	:
	      <Message-ID>   	   date
	      <Message-ID>   	   date	 	   files

       The Message-ID field is the value of the article's Message-ID header, including the angle brackets.

       The date field consists of three sub-fields separated by a tilde.  All sub-fields are the text representation  of  the  number  of  seconds
       since  the  epoch -- i.e., a time_t; see gettimeofday(2).  The first sub-field is the article's arrival date.  If copies of the article are
       still present then the second sub-field is either the value of the article's Expires header, or a hyphen if no expiration date  was  speci-
       fied.   If  an article has been expired then the second sub-field will be a hyphen.  The third sub-field is the value of the article's Date
       header, recording when the article was posted.

       The files field is a set of entries separated by one or more spaces.  Each entry consists of the name of the newsgroup, a  slash,  and  the
       article number.	This field is empty if the article has been expired.

       For  example, an article cross-posted to comp.sources.unix and comp.sources.d that was posted on February 10, 1991 (and received three min-
       utes later), with an expiration date of May 5, 1991, could have a history line (broken into two lines for display) like the following:
	      <312@litchi.foo.com>  		666162000~673329600~666162180  	
		  comp.sources.unix/1104 comp.sources.d/7056

       In addition to the text file, there is a dbz(3z) database associated with the file that uses the Message-ID field as a key to determine the
       offset  in  the	text  file  where the associated line begins.  For historical reasons, the key includes the trailing  byte (which is not
       stored in the text file).

HISTORY

       Written by Rich $alz <rsalz@uunet.uu.net> for InterNetNews.  This is revision 1.12, dated 1996/09/06.

SEE ALSO

       dbz(3z), expire(8), innd(8), news-recovery(8).

																	HISTORY(5)