Humm. I wonder if some of the tech bigwigs at my company have been reading the same M$ glossies that your .edu friends have been reading. We recently had a number of firm and unalterable decrees on the subject of IT policy sent out, some of which were not particularly well thought out: - no downloading software from the internet (we do all know that the internet isn't trustworthy, right? by the way, if I do Perl development for the company, does that mean my job is now outlawed?) - no installing software unless it comes on a shrinkwrapped CD from a vendor with whom we have licensed the software (yeah, now how about running those Microsoft updates that my PC wants me to do?) - no embedded account/password combinations in plaintext in programs (wait...just about every program we have ftp's a report to a client somewhere...are they going to allocate time/money/resources to bring the existing infrastructure into compliance?) - no external IM clients...use the corporate IM server with the corporate IM client (no file transfer capability) - any files with extensions (it seems) other than .txt or .dat are banned from email attachments (but you can rename them to .dat if you like...)
**major frustration** This isn't even just about blaming virii for everything. This is about people (dare I say, microserfs?) who believe that anything that can't be administered with a few mouse clicks is somehow black magic, and suspect at that, and the fact that they admin with a few mouse clicks somehow confers upon them wisdom and knowledge equal to their perceived admin power. It seems that while Microsoft has succeeded in dumbing down the system administration process on their servers, that a correlating trend has been overlooked: the dumbing down of Microsoft admins. Is there a solution for this sort of ignorance? William -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
