Why did I ever become a windows sysadmin?

I’ve been asking myself that question lately.

Here’s the picture. I’m a Mac fag, happy to be one too, I have an OSX Server which is going to get pimped to Debian sometime soon and an Ubuntu server at home which functions as gateway, firewall and a location for my housemates to run their screens with irssi.

Now somewhere three to four years ago I became a student at the University of Twente and after a good year hanging in there I became a system admin at our I.C.T. study association there. As they had the Unix part up and running just fine I decided to focus on the part which wasn’t a happy puppy, Windows.

I really do not know why I made that choice. Maybe I wanted a challenge, then again, I might as well have had a glass to much to drink.

So here I am today, being called a Windows guru by some while I still feel at loss inside that OS. I do not understand its design choices, I certainly don’t understand how it works internally (I’m just picturing BIll Gates with a wand doing all kind of magic) and I certainly don’t understand where all its issues come from, yet somehow I manage to solve them which people are grateful for. So I guess that makes up for it.

Take today for example. First I needed to get Windows to share some files and require authentication. Seems like an easy task right… Well guess what, you’re WRONG! First you need to disable Easy File Sharing (if you even have it on, what a†horrendously†horrible thing that is). Then you go to Administrative Tools, Computer Management > Something something > Shares and you create the share with the necessary Security and Share settings. You think you’re done but guess what, YOU”RE WRONG, again… Why? Because Windows will never ever ever prompt you for a username and password if the Guest account is enabled. So you disable to guest account and after†fiddling†with the permissions some more you finally got it right and it works.

This took me about an hour to figure it all out, whereas I could have fixed it in 5min. if Windows had something called smb.conf.

Now even stranger, somewhere along the way Windows had lost some permissions on the share itself, as in, who could access it on the local disk, not over samba.

So I thought to myself, that’s easy, right click, go to Security, add the user group you need (or user), give it the necessary rights, hit apply and everything is fixed ’cause Windows applies the permissions of the top folder to subfolders and files unless†explicitly†taught otherwise. WRONG, again.

Turns out, Windows did set the permissions to all subfolders but not to the files… Why, again, I do not know, triple checked everything, it should apply the permissions to the files in folders and subfolders, but no.

How you fix it? You Ctrl+a the content of the parent folder, you copy it into a new folder on you Desktop, erase the content of the folder having issues, make sure the rights are set correctly and paste the content back in it. And guess what, it worked!

So, someone, anyone, the great God of freaking Poseidon, I don’t care, someone, explain to me, why the heck did I become a Windows System Administrator?

I have one small theory myself: because when you are a Windows System Administrator and you have a bad day you just know that when you get home and leave Windows behind, everything will start and shine, be happy pink fluffy†perky butterfly over the†rainbow sunshine… Then again, maybe I’m just insane.