Complexifying
“Sometimes I wonder about the complexifying instinct,” says Brent Simmons over at inessential.com. Yeah, sometimes I wonder about that myself. Two of my coworkers just dreamt up this complex user management scheme, complete with scripts and whatnot. Things automatically add people to other things, another script removes people, and my prediction is that sometime down the road one of the scripts will go nuts and delete everybody. “What’s wrong with the current system?” I asked. “What current system? We don’t have one.” “Sure we do. We have a tool to run ad-hoc commands on all the boxes. When someone leaves you tell us and we do a userdel on that username. When someone new shows up you tell us and …
