So I figure I’ll tell good news as well as bad. I can relate things in a snide manner, so I’m still sticking to the spirit of the blog.
Here’s a conversation I had with a Business Systems Analyst today:
Analyst: “Hi $REALNAME, I have 4 shares that I need users to have access to. I was thinking that setting the permissions for each user on the share would be a bad idea, so I was thinking we may just want to build a group and put everyone in it. That way if we need to make any changes we can just modify the one group.”
Me: *speechless*
Why is this noteworthy? Well, this is a system administration methodology that we’ve been fighting for literally years to get this particular client to understand and implement. This is a client that will have nested shares, with different permissions all set at the user level, and have things like “everyone” set to full access at the root of the drive, thus eliminating any of the security.
“But Uncle Bob,” you say. “Isn’t that absolutely retarded?”
Yes. You are correct. It’s heinously retarded. But it’s what we inherited and have been struggling to correct. Cleaning up this mess is chore enough, but when you add to it the fact that we have to explain why it’s a good idea to use groups instead of individuals to high level IT people at this organization.
And this came from a BSA who just thought “it would make more sense.” If this was only infectious… especially to people in the IT division.
