How To Torture Your System Administrators

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How to torture your system administrators: a checklist for developers.

1. Insist on using /etc/hosts instead of DNS, because it is more secure that way.

2. Run everything as root, because your application is secure. You’ve heard of no problems with it.

3. Scatter the components of your application into no less than five filesystems.

4. Demand the latest versions of libraries and languages even though the ones that ship with the OS you are on have everything you need. Newer is definitely always better.

5. Treat your database as a flat file (“select * from TABLE”).

6. Use more than one programming/scripting language for a project.

7. Store data in /tmp.

8. Insist that your application needs its own server, for performance reasons (dual quad-core Xeons, 16 GB of RAM).

9. Hard-code IP addresses into your applications and scripts.

10. Always use ‘debug’ level logging. Always. To syslog, using authpriv.crit.

2 thoughts on “How To Torture Your System Administrators”

  2. _Way_ too many of these are familiar.

    Also you forgot:

    11. Never test your app for bugs in IE because “They should use firefox anyway”

    12. Request horrible mod_rewrite kludges in order to avoid fixing broken legacy links.

    13. When asked for backup retention periods, respond “back everything up nightly” because 40 Terabytes should easily fit on your Turing800 infinite magnetic tape library.

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