Microsoft’s Own: Easy on the SysAdmins
Posted January 28th, 2003 @ 09:28am by Erik J. Barzeski
From this entry at the unusually named "Better Living Through Software" (the guy is a Microsoft employee) comes this quote:
Many geeks like to point out "sysadmins who haven't updated their patches for six months" as the cause of worm outbreaks like this. If everyone had updated their patches within the last six months, this worm would not have spread; but I think that misses the point. Sysadmins don't keep up with patches; just as the sun rises in the east. Blaming sysadmins does nothing to solve the problem.
It may not solve the problem, but hiring good sysadmins and firing the incompetent ones might go a long way towards solving the problem. Way to make excuses for your fellow Microsoftian morons. And yes, I'd react the same way if some Unix bug took down a lot of Mac OS X machines when a patch had been available for six months.
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Posted 28 Jan 2003 at 11:23am #
I don't think it's in the best interest of Microsoft, or IT in general, to have competent sysadmins and systems which don't break. I remember working for a large defense contractor, and we did an analysis of support costs for Mac v. PC (we were about 50/50 back in the early 90s), and found out that Macs cost about 10x less human time to support. Human time is much more expensive than hardware. So what did the CIO decide? That we should get rid of all Macs.
Posted 28 Jan 2003 at 11:34am #
No, he's right - the sysadmins are only human, and can't be held responsible. Rather, the bulk of the blame must surely be placed at.. the softco who riddled the fucking SQL Server with bugs in the first place.
That guy's blog is quite creepy, and not just because of the line-height. Altogether a bit George Orwell.