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Distributing Clue to Users

By Leonidas
1st Edition October 2000
1-4542-432-7, Order Number: 1032 / 48
S, M, L, XL, XXL, XXXL, from $12.95
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Users eh? Can't live with 'em, can't leave 'em under the raised floor in the machine room for more than a few weeks. In the end it's probably best if you give them mininal amount of information required to keep them out of your way. They say "Knowledge is Power". They are wrong (and you can tell them I said so). Knowledge is Trouble, especially when it's in the wrong hands. And you know that those hands are any hands but your own. And possibly the PFY's, but don't bet on it.

Teaching users to actually do stuff can be a dangerous habit to get in to. You can end up trapped in front of a group of ski-slope-headed middle-managers forcing you to poke holes in the firewall to get their mp3 collection streamed from home over your ISDN. You can spend forty minutes explaining the difference between POP and IMAP to a secretary who still thinks every time she gets a 404 that the whole internet is broken.

Still, at the end of the day, empowering the users is probably the best thing to do. Teaching the little darlings to work without you acting as safety-net is a good thing. Showing them how to edit their config files with vi is a good idea. Letting them have the access to poke amanda and change the tapes is the right thing to do while you're away or ill is just building resilience into the system, yeah.

...

Yeah. You go right on thinking that.

Related O'Really T-shirts:

BOFH in a Nutshell
LART Pocket Reference
Why You Can't Find Your UNIX System Administrator

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