Hell Is Other Admins

Yesterday I wrote that users are what make the job hard. The prevailing philosophy of this is that users == problems, so if you remove the users, you remove the problems. Right?

Wrong. Hell, I've learned, is other admins. Those are the people who act as your counterpart at other locations: businesses, universities, and miscellaneous. By the very nature of the position, a sysadmin should be quite competent, and interactions between them should be both professional and intimate.

This almost never happens.

In the past, I've had to deal with some pretty horrid admins. I've dealt with an admin in Texas who ran a hosting company's mail servers, but didn't know that double reverse DNS lookups are not a security measure. "Mail to our servers is being rejected," she says. "Turn off your reverse DNS lookups," I suggest. She protests at first, but relents to a single test message. "It works!" she says. "Great. Now you know what the problem was. Turn off the DNS lookups and you can receive our mail again." "I can't do that!" she laments.

One time, I had this really deep-voiced, malicious sounding voicemail waiting for me when I got in. It went a little like "Hello, Mr. So-and-so. (Long pause.) I run the network servers at Such-and-such Incorporated, and we appear to have difficulties sending and receiving mail to your domain. I'll be in touch." The entire message was spoken in the same tone of voice that Mr. McEvil would say to the hero, "Your wife and daughter are guests at my estate, Mr. Bravely, and they're having a wonderful time here. I suggest you obtain the Obsidian processor before midnight tonight. I wouldn't want anything to happen to them."

Today, it's a nearby admin (very nearby) who has a user who can't send a 3MB attachment to one of my users. So instead of making a couple of phone calls, this admin decides to send a test message to a couple of different accounts: administrator@ and postmaster@. It comes to my inbox and is immediately classified as spam because of its content. "Let me know if you get this message or not," the message says.

I'm still not sure how I'd go about notifying her that I didn't get the message she's sent asking me to notify her if I didn't get a message I wasn't expecting from someone I don't know.

So I write back. "Received," I say, then ask to see her logs. Logs will help solve the problem. She instead writes back, smartly deducing that since the administrator@ message bounced back to her, then I must have gotten the postmaster@ message. Sherlock Holmes she is not. She then proceeds to include both the administrator@ bounce message (not helpful) and the e-mail thread between her and her user regarding the problem (also not helpful).

Notice, kind reader, how neither of those two things are the logs I asked for.

She then follows this up with another message, asking me what kind of restrictions I run on my mail server, because the attachment might be causing the problem (Y'think?!) I reply to her with a brief laundry list of what we accept and what we reject. It's pretty common: we reject executable content and most compressed files that strongly resemble compressed content, as well as a slew of other file extentions and MIME types. Again, I ask to see her logs.

But I'm not holding my breath.

Update: She sent me the logs! As Print Screens pasted into an MS Word document! Oh boy! And she's using Exchange! Today must be my birthday!