> I've seen this situation before, all too many times: system
> administrators who do all they can to limit what people can do
> on the system. Instead of viewing their jobs as serving the
> primary purpose of enabling users to do useful things with
> the system, they are far more concerned that their own
> workloads don't grow. The larger the organization, the more
> resistant the system administrator is. To 'convince him
> otherwise' it is almost always necessary to go to his
> supervisor or the head honcho, explain what you want to do,
> and ask him/her to remove the obstacle to progress with a
> direct order to the system administrator to make it so. You
> don't win a lot of friends that way, but at least you can
> get things accomplished.
Why do you think it's this way? Here are some possibilities:
1. System administrators tend to be jerks. There's just something about the
job that attracts jerks.
2. System administrators tend to already have full workloads, and thus are
concerned about increasing those workloads.
3. System administrators often are assigned goals which are contradictory:
security and convenience, for example.
There's a very good reason why, "the larger the organization, the more
resistant the system administrator is". Rather than simply viewing the
sysadmin as an obstacle, or as a servant, you might consider that the
administrator is responsible for what users do, and has a very good reason
for limiting that in many cases. You might think your reasons for overriding
the sysadmin are better; in some cases, they certainly are.
My point, though, is that until an organization takes system administration,
security and maintenance seriously, the poor sap who gets stuck dealing with
those issues will, for his own sake, generally be pretty wary about anything
he can't control.
Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software
http://www.figleaf.com/
voice: (202) 797-5496
fax: (202) 797-5444
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