Thursday, March 28, 2024
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HomeFrom The FieldAnd here's the reason why we don't just hand out admin access

And here’s the reason why we don’t just hand out admin access

I walked into work one morning and the company receptionist immediately greeted me with “Mornin! Hey the network’s down.” Unfortunately it wasn’t the first time my morning as network manager started that way. I made my way to my office to dump my stuff and see what was going on. Since my office was as far from the front door as you can get without jumping out a window I had to run the “network’s down” gauntlet through the office.

I barely sat in my chair and turned on my computer monitor before my manager popped her head into my office with a worried look on her face. She wasn’t a terribly technical person but managed the jargon okay and did a decent job of running interference (yes, pretty much like the IT Crowd frighteningly enough).

She told me: “I think I broke the network.” I nodded and waited for the explanation. “I was moving some files around and I think I dragged and dropped the wrong thing.”

You see, the day or so prior she had requested that I give her administrative privileges on our file server since she was “in charge of IS” and all. I remember shaking my head as I made the change and thinking no good could come of that.

Sure enough, I looked at the root of drive on the file server to see that she had dragged and dropped the root application folder (the file share everyone in the company used to access shared applications run from the server – and there were a lot of them including all of accounting and payroll) someplace inaccessible to everyone except an administrator. I quickly moved the folder back and gave the heads up to my helpdesk folk who were just arriving to work what had happened.

I walked around the corner to update my manager that I had fixed the problem. She sighed and asked me to remove her administrative privileges right away too. I told her “no problem” as I went back to my office to do just that.

via: [Reddit\TalesFromTechSupport]

Picture Source: [o5com (CC)]

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