[geeks] Compuholics anonymous

[Kurt Mosiejczuk]

On Mon, 29 Apr 2002, Bill Bradford wrote:

> He hated SGIs *before* he worked there..

I actually had a chat with my buddy who hates SGI.  It turns out that is
the main difference, he hates SGI.  He thought the hardware was fairly
sweet, but the people at SGI sucked.

The setup there is pretty much the WORST for SGI machines.  All machines
are directly on the net.  As in the internet.  No firewalls, nothing.
That's the way they work.  Bad juju for IRIX.

His favorite bug was the one where ANY user could remap your keymaps under
X.  So, a user could remap, say 'M', to '\ncd\nrm -rf *\n'.  So the next
time you hit M, your home directory disappears.  Hope you weren't root.

And the SGI people wouldn't admit it was a bug.  And the salesdroid went
so far as to insinuate that my friend didn't have any clue about adminning
ANY kind of UNIX box.

He also ran into the fun of finding security holes, reporting them and being
told "Oh, that's fixed in 6.x" where x in this case was a release that
didn't run on the Indys he had.  No consolidation relase yet.  So, it was
"already fixed" so they wouldn't talk to him, but he couldn't USE the fix.

And then there was the salesdroid who used SPEC results from a DIFFERENT
MACHINE to try and get my buddy to buy Octanes instead of Ultra 10s.  The
SPEC results were for a decked out Octane and they were trying to sell him
a low end Octane.

Then he told me they tried to sell him one of the big machines they trucked
around the country (remember the SGI tractor trailers?) for a "small discount".
Ugh.

So, I feel at peace using SGI machines for my personal use, but I don't know
that I'd ever want to be responsible for adminning a large number of them.
Particularly where the user base needs to be considered hostile, like at a
university.

--Kurt