[wplug] OT: Gold-Disk system administration and its pittfalls (was Re: suggestions on Unix/Linux machines at Pitt labs?)

[Mike Procario]

Michael A. Smith wrote:

>Juan Zuluaga's post about the Pitt Solaris labs made me think about my
>company, which (in the finest traditions of management) is thinking
>about applying a gold-disk model to system administration.
>
>What I mean by "gold-disk" is that:
>
>    * Everyone gets the same exact computer specs
>    * Everyone gets the same WinXP disk image
>    * Everyone gets the same local privileges (Windows' "power user" for
>      those who know)
>    * Everyone gets treated exactly the same by the HelpDesk, regardless
>      of job description
>
>I've told the system administrators why I think this is far too general
>a solution for the variety of users we have, but I'm guessing their
>input will only be one of several factors in the decision that will
>finally be made by management.
>
>*Pitt*
>Pitt has a similar problem: I'd be willing to wager that some people at
>Pitt use close to 0% of their 10MB of disk space. (Those who forward
>their email to hotmail.com and don't know what UNIX is, for example.)
>
>Given the large number of people at Pitt (everyone gets at least 10MB,
>profs and staff may get more), I'm guessing there are a few gigs of
>space that some non-users will never miss. Would it be so hard to
>dynamically allocate space based on usage? Couldn't it be set up so that
>until a user logs into UNIX he has 5MB of space, a user who forwards his
>email off-campus and never logs in has 1MB of space, and a user who uses
>the UNIX system regularly has a percentage quota of the remainder?
>
>*My Company
>*Back at my company we have far fewer people with whom to deal than
>Pitt. We just recently spun off from an enormous parent, and some of our
>management are still stuck in the "everything must be an
>uber-generalized procedure" mentality that large companies often spawn.
>
>I think this sort of thing could be solved with use cases, where the
>actors represent the different kinds of users. Does anyone have an
>success stories about turning management away from the "all users are
>the same" mentality?
>
>Thanks,
>Mike
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>
>
>
>  
>
I work for the Office of Science in the US Department of Energy.  We 
have support scientific research at universities and national labs. We 
have two basic classes of workers, scientists with Ph.Ds who make 
decisions about funding and administrative staff who see that the money 
gets to where it is supposed to go. Many of the scientists  are serious 
power users, like me,  who customize their machines extensively for 
personal convenience: Firefox, vim, cygwin tools, and for real work 
needs: document management tools, scripting languages. I was generating 
reports based on data from the Fermi National Accelerator Lab website 
every week, and got tired of doing by hand so I wrote a python script to 
grab and analyze the data. So far so good.

As part of the President's "management agenda" (words to put fear into 
the heart of bureaucrats everywhere), the Office of Science was supposed 
to convert to the DOE wide support system. Our email storage was to go 
down 50%. If Google can give me 2 GB for free why can't I keep my 500 MB 
to allow me to my job.  Our computers were to be locked down so we could 
not do software installs. Our backed up storage space was to decrease. 

However, the day that the first person in our office was converted over, 
the project was suspended. Unfortunately the solution may not help you. 
The brand new Secretary of Energy had gone through one of the massive 
consolidations in a previous job and he knew how badly they can go. He 
sent it back for more study, where I hope it stays.

-- 

--
Mike Procario
"Another casualty of applied metaphysics" -Calvin and Hobbes