Computerworld - February 13, 2012

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Samsung .......... 24, 25

HAL MAYFORTH

You’re Sure That’s What You Want?

The phones at this company have a key sequence that enables auto-answer, so the phone doesn’t ring — the caller is immediately connected to the phone’s speaker, reports a netadmin pilot fish who’s responsible for the phone system there. “There’s a small satellite facility with loud production machinery, and when the phone there was accidentally placed in auto-answer mode, I was quick to o;er to help,” says fish. “But I was stopped in my tracks by the supervisor, who works at the main plant. He said, ‘I love this. I can always tell if the machinery is running by placing a call. Leave it the way it is.’ I pointed out that it will be di;cult for the machine operators to hear an incoming phone call. ‘That’s not a problem,’ he said. ‘I can get their attention.’ I gave up, and the phone is still on auto-answer a year later. Of course, I always snicker when I walk by the supervisor’s o;ce and hear ’SAM! I’M ON THE PHONE! SAAAAAAM!’ ”

It’s Easier This Way
One of this sysadmin pilot fish’s
regular tasks is to recover space on
Windows servers. “We constantly re-
ceived tickets for low space, so I usu-
ally looked up the biggest consumers
and then called or emailed them and
asked them to delete old and large
files,” fish says. “This worked well
until I got the bright idea to use a
script that would find old and large
files, then dump the user’s email ID
into an Outlook message. The first
few times worked great. But then one
day, a VP stopped by my desk to tell
me that company o;cers didn’t know
what the email was about because
their executive assistants handled all
that, and not to bother them with any
more emails. Within a few months,
we purchased more SAN. I wonder
how much free space it has.”

Just Making Sure?

An outside vendor handles spam filtering at this small university, but it’s not unusual for users to forward spam that sneaks through to this pilot fish and request that it be added to the blacklist.

“Such requests usually are handled by analyzing the header to see if there’s anything that can be done to make the filter more e;ective,” says fish. But sometimes it’s easier — such as when a user forwards messages with sexually explicit language that any spam filter worth its salt should have caught.

Reports fish, “Running the message headers through the software’s built-in analyzer brought back this result: ‘Message marked as spam — status: quarantined.’ I then explained to the user that if the message was in her quarantine folder, the system was doing its job — there was no need to release the message and forward it to the help desk.”

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