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sreweekly/markdown/248/05-scary-sysadmin-halloween-stories.md

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+# Scary sysadmin Halloween stories
+
+- **期号**: SRE Weekly Issue #248（2020-12-13）
+- **作者**: Dean Wilson
+- **链接**: https://www.unixdaemon.net/sysadmin/scary-sysadmin-halloween-stories/
+
+## 简介
+
+I shouldn’t enjoy reading these so much… got any of your own to share?
+
+## 正文
+
+# Scary sysadmin Halloween stories
+
+Gremlin recently ran a small twitter hashtag challenge called “#talesfromtheNOC” where people were invited to share their scary sysadmin stories. Reading through of the entries I was reminded of one slightly less than welcoming environment that led to a lot of learning, frustration and trepidation. I’ve captured my posts here.
+
+## Opening Volley
+
+I was hired as the new sysadmin at a financial services company and had no hand over as my predecessor had apparently ‘left on short notice’. On my first day the CTO and I took a trip to the colo to check the asset register against the running machines.
+
+After unlocking the back of the first rack I gave the door a little tug
+and it didn’t budge. “It sticks sometimes. Give it a decent pull.” said
+the CTO helpfully, so I put a *little* more force behind it and yanked
+the door open. Luckily the company never skimped on cable tie quality so
+I managed to pop out every individually tied to the rack door(!) power
+cable in one swing. It took a moment for us to realise what had happened
+as dozens of fans were suddenly silenced…
+
+I later learned more about the meaning of ‘left on short notice’ and found a number of other little presents over my first few months in that role.
+
+## The second incursion
+
+Same place as the previous story: I plugged the KVM into the management
+machine and was greeted by a full X-windows session. Unusual but not the
+first time I’d seen it. I logged in, decided to see if the previous
+admin still had access and ran `visudo`. The process seemed to hang and
+I paused for a few moments to consider what was going on.
+
+Shuddering slowly to life on a heavily underspecced machine was a full
+install and process of Eclipse with `/etc/sudoers` open. `$EDITOR` was set to
+`eclipse`. What kind of person does that? A
+[MONSTER!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7X3LYGV_N8&t=40)
+
+## Saboteur Strikes
+
+To finish the ‘trilogy of twattery’ the same person used to leave a
+sendmail m4 file on the machine that DID NOT generate the running `.cf`
+file. So if you didn’t move it out before the machines rebooted the
+daemon regenerated its config and you came up with broken mail servers.
+
+That was made slightly more annoying coupled with the booby trapped power cabling previously mentioned.
+
+It was a very long first day.