Work has been going well, at least as far as the employment part of it goes. The task list is a freaking nightmare.

I reported a week or so ago about the number of people (279) that had 'root' (administrator) access across the domain due to a programming error by my predecessor. But that's not half of it. Another 240 or so had no access whatsoever (and should have). Yet another 40 or so had non-zero duplicate login ID's ('uids' in Unix-ese). This means that any of them could write over or steal files from the other folks with whom they shared ID's. 

This is all due to programming errors by my predecessor. There are just under 2000 accounts, so a little more than one in four were hopelessly screwed up. 

I've also had to break in to about 40 machines because my predecessor didn't leave any password information for them and doesn't respond to (phone,email) queries. He's still at the 'Uni' (University) and somehow managed to get promoted to central IT services. Gawdd, I fear for the damage that he can do with even more access to the central infrastructure systems like payroll, purchasing, enrollment databases, etc. Most of the departmental machines (the ones I'm now caring for) have custom built scripts for performing user and system management. Those dealing with system management are as buggy as the ones managing users. It's some of the most horrid looking buggy code I've ever encountered - and I've been encountering buggy code for over half my life.

At least I'm not in danger of running out of things to fix any time soon. I'm amazed some of this stuff worked at all. In fact, most of it didn't - or just worked marginally enough that nobody ever noticed how flucked up it really was.

Oh well. Slowly but surely I'm getting all of this stuff whipped into shape.