This company outsources its data center hosting, which really doesn't mean much difference for a systems manager pilot fish. "The vendor had the data center on-site," fish says. "When we had to do updates or debug problems with this one particular purchased software package, someone from the hosting vendor would accompany us into the server room, log onto the server with an admin log-in and let us do our thing."
But then the company changes vendors -- and now the data center is hundreds of miles away. "They had no familiarity with this software package," says fish, "They gave us admin IDs so we could log on remotely to the servers set up specifically for that software and do the work ourselves."
Fast-forward two months: A data security guy at the vendor notices the admin IDs. He knows nothing about the arrangement. He tries to contact someone in security at fish's home office, but that person ignores his e-mails and messages.
Since he can't figure out who the admin IDs belong to, vendor security guy revokes the access on two of the three servers.
"One more month goes by," fish says. "I get an e-mail that one of those servers is dangerously close to crashing with a full disk. I try to log on to see what's happening. I can't. I try to attach to the drives. I can't.
"I talk to someone up there and find out who took away the access. I contact the guy and explain to him that I need access so I can fix this problem before the server crashes."
It's against our policy to grant the access you had, and I won't do it, security guy tells fish.
Fish points out that he can't fix the problem without access. Security guy says fish just needs to delete some files. Fish asks how he can delete files without access.
"He starts reading off folder names and asks, 'How about if I just delete this one, it's very big,'" grumbles fish. "I tell him I have no idea, as it's a vendor package and I'm not familiar enough with any of the folders to give the OK to delete it.
"He finally gives me very limited access to a few shared folders he picked. I feel like he's asking me to put on a blindfold and play 'file pinata' and whack off a few files.
"Needless to say, I only freed up about 1GB of space. The problem is still waiting to get out of control and cause the server to crash -- or at least that's what the guy in operations says will happen.
"It's now been another two to three weeks and we're still waiting for access to our own dedicated servers so we can address the problems. I think this guy just takes his 'data security' title too seriously."
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