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Remove “This incident will be reported.” from user warnings

github.com

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Re: Remove “This incident will be reported.” from user warnings

#231

Post by hutzlibu »

NegativeK wrote: post #176
hutzlibu wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this kind of sysadmin still exists? (or do they even still have the freedom to be so kind?) I cannot really imagine that happening today, at least not in "professional" context.

Yes....? If I see info in logs and it could help a user (my userbase is internal), I reach out to them. I've coached a number of them through improving something on their end, even if it's not a critical change. And I'm by no means some sysadmin wizard.

"And I'm by no means some sysadmin wizard. "

It is more about the general attitude, so thank you, for being a helpful IT admin.

Re: Remove “This incident will be reported.” from user warnings

#232

Post by xpe »

barnbuilder wrote: post #141

Social media communities really ought to observe a "leave no trace" rule with respect to GitHub and other such spaces. This commit from February 2022 is now as of today littered with a bunch of joke comments from being linked from here and previously somewhere else earlier (based on timestamps).

You might enjoy reading ann Atlantic article titled something like “I don’t wanna see you smoking pot”. It is an opinion piece about the importance of community norms.

Re: Remove “This incident will be reported.” from user warnings

#233

Post by aaronmdjones »

rsynnott wrote: post #170
bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar reaction to Windows 95's "An illegal operation has occurred." I remember wondering whether the police were on their way.

Who is General Protection, and why is he at fault for my programs crashing?

His second-in-command, Colonel Panic, is to be equally feared.

Re: Remove “This incident will be reported.” from user warnings

#234

Post by purpleidea »

DonHopkins wrote: post #220
1lint wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an amusing anecdote, though I find it bothersome the sysadmin failed to correctly implement the echo command

I find it bothersome that the "yes" command outputs "y" by default instead of "yes". False advertising! Since Unix loves short concise command names, why not just name it "y"?

It does so you can pipe to commands that want a string of "press y/N" sort of things.

If you want yes write `yes yes`. And one character commands are almost generally avoided. So don't name it "y".

Re: Remove “This incident will be reported.” from user warnings

#236

Post by mr_toad »

ww520 wrote: post #143
stilley2 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once entered 'sudo echo hi" or something similar on a large HPCC and received an email back from a sysadmin that just said "hello".

There's the talk command on Unix. We used to do a 'who' to find out who're on the system and 'talk' to them.

Back when I was at university the x servers on our terminals were not secured, and other people could open output on your terminal. A favourite was a program that sent cockroaches scurrying around the screen whenever you moved a window.

Re: Remove “This incident will be reported.” from user warnings

#237

Post by squeaky-clean »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #172

Alright, did I tell my college sysadmin story already? This is the perfect place to drop it. 1990, freshman in college, Pascal class on AT&T Unix SVR3 3B2 cluster named "earth", "wind", and "fire". We'd just learned our way around "vi" and how to "uvapc" our Pascal source into a.out. I discovered anonymous ftp, and "make", and I quickly rose to become the gaming king of Pascal class. I had ularn, nethack, megs and me…

> AT&T Unix SVR3 3B2 cluster named "earth", "wind", and "fire".

Not related to sudo, but this brought back a memory of the cluster I had access to during my college internship. 6 computers, I don't remember what kind or vendor. Named after the starter Pokemon for generations 1 & 2. They were in the rear of the room behind a cage I did not have a key for.

One day a sysadmin came into the room asking "Uhhh... I'm looking for a... totodile?" The way he pronounced totodile made it clear he had no idea what a pokemon was.

He had to remove it and replace something, didn't really give us any details. A few days later he brought the server back and hooked it back up to the cluster. The very first thing we did was rename it to Croconaw. (The evolved form of Totodile).

Re: Remove “This incident will be reported.” from user warnings

#239

Post by squeaky-clean »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #102
kitsunesoba wrote: post #93

Reminds me of using Win9x when programs crashed (as often happened then), prompting Windows to present those "This program has performed an illegal operation" dialogs. As a kid the only bit of that message that made any sense was "illegal operation" which made me wonder if I'd broken some law somehow.

This is why I don't put easter eggs or obscure programmer-lingo into programs anymore. Every error is potentially user-facing.

At the very least if it's something where I need to include a technical error message or stack trace, I like to include something like

"An unexpected error occurred! If this happens multiple times, here is some information you can email our support team:\n{technical output}"

Of course often the support team is just me.

Re: Remove “This incident will be reported.” from user warnings

#240

Post by hiepph »

jimmaswell wrote: post #74
dingledork69 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you set up your system so mail for root gets redirected to an smtp server with an actual inbox read by actual people

I was surprised to start getting emails about my cron tasks once I set up my mail server. It's neat.

Well, it depends! Because what you need to see more often is errors. You don't want successful notifications "spam" more often than error notifications.
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