The Userless Datacenter

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Not sure if this is original content or not, if it is it’s simply brilliant!, Guiness Brilliant!

I have a dream.Someday, when I win the lottery, I’m going to do this. I’m going to run a userless datacenter. It’ll be a state of the art datacenter with raised floors and full environmental controls. We’ll have the latest and greatest Cisco equipment, with fibre to the desktop. We’ll setup a trouble-ticket system and check it everyday, giggling hysterically at the “No active tickets” message. We won’t carry pagers or cell phones, and the help desk phone will be one of those little fisher price things that toddlers pull around. When something needs to be rebooted, it can only be rebooted during working hours.

This datacenter will be a safe haven for systems administrators worldwide. Frustrated admins who are just minutes away from going postal will be able to come to my datacenter (their company will pay, of course) and work for a week or two in a userless environment. Budhist monks will be available for those needing even more inner peace, and massage babes personally approved by me will conduct random stress relief. While performing their duties, they’ll whisper things like “the change you made to the router did not delete my spreadsheet,” “we really appreciate all the effort you put into tuning the network performance,” and “you’re the expert, I trust you to make that call.”

Only real servers will be in this datacenter. Sun, HP, IBM servers. Any Intel servers will be running Linux or xBSD. There will be a cabinet labeled “NT Servers.” It will be empty. It will have cobwebs, and will be a focal point of positive energy. Desktops will be Linux, xBSD, or Macintosh. Email containing Excel, Word, VBS, and .ZIP attachments will be silently dropped into /dev/null on the *NIX mailserver. In fact, the mailserver will reject all email by default, and only email from people personally known by the sysadmins of the userless datacenter will be allowed through (the ultimate “opt-in” system).

There will be nerf guns spaced evenly around the datacenter, and a strict dress code of jeans and t-shirts is required. Each office (no cubes, only offices) will be equipped with an Espresso/Coffee machine, and mini-fridge stocked nightly with caffenated beverages. Speaking of nightly, no after-hours work is allowed. If you’re there after hours, you had better be playing games, coding open source projects, or surfing porn. No exceptions.

I have a dream.

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