The strangeness of users
Aug. 3rd, 2008 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylIn general, our user community is pretty clueful. I guess it comes with the territory: to know that you've got a requirement for HPC, you generally have to know what you're doing. But every so often you get a question that makes you stop and think.
For example, on Friday, I was contacted by a user wanting to know how to use telnet in to the system. But, least you think I'm being unfair, the user had (a) the name of the remote system; (b) the name of the command they needed to use, i.e.
Thought no more about it until, that is, today when I logged on to investigate the failure of one of the tape drives. After getting my overtime payment for doing not much more than telling the operations people to follow their normal procedures, I checked my mail to discover that I'd got two replies to my telnet email. The first contained a literal transcript of a telnet session that stopped at the point where the user had been prompted for their password, followed by a plaintive request that I inform them of their password — this despite repeated assurances over the years that sysadmins do not know user passwords. The second request, dated a few minutes later, was to inform me that I no longer needed to inform them of their password because they'd remembered it.
I guess that on balance I should just be thankful it was such an easy request to sort out...
For example, on Friday, I was contacted by a user wanting to know how to use telnet in to the system. But, least you think I'm being unfair, the user had (a) the name of the remote system; (b) the name of the command they needed to use, i.e.
telnet; and (c) ten years of experience with Unix! Full of cheerfulness following lunch in Topsham, I bit back a curmudgeonly retort and pinged off a reply containing the required command and thought no more about it.Thought no more about it until, that is, today when I logged on to investigate the failure of one of the tape drives. After getting my overtime payment for doing not much more than telling the operations people to follow their normal procedures, I checked my mail to discover that I'd got two replies to my telnet email. The first contained a literal transcript of a telnet session that stopped at the point where the user had been prompted for their password, followed by a plaintive request that I inform them of their password — this despite repeated assurances over the years that sysadmins do not know user passwords. The second request, dated a few minutes later, was to inform me that I no longer needed to inform them of their password because they'd remembered it.
I guess that on balance I should just be thankful it was such an easy request to sort out...
