[ale] venting about an old sysadmin - WAS: Using OS X as a thinclient

[Preston Boyington]

John Heim wrote:
> Preston, I would like to know what objection the Windows sysadmins had to 
> using a live CD. Why would they have a problem with that?


understand that my viewpoint is skewed (ok, borderline hostile) toward
these guys, but they actually said that i was using "hacker" tools and
it was a security risk.  never mind that i even went so far as to get my
project leader to come over to watch me and i unplugged from their network.

the fact that i had a personal key to the building, pass code for the
alarm, and full read and write access to each and every file on all but
one server (the Exchange mail server) apparently never entered into
their minds.

i was written up for using "sort" in a bash terminal with a Knoppix
LiveCD.  about 2200 pages with over 134,000 rows of comma delimited text
was corrected in just a few minutes and it torqued them.

(you can check the ALE archives for the original post.  think it is
"sorting large delimited text files" around July 2005)

i guess i should have lied when they asked me how i was able to fix the
file when they were having such a difficult time, but i was hoping that
they would appreciate having another tool available to them.  too honest
for my own good, i guess.