AA (not his real initials) is the ex-boss' son.
Boss was not an owner. Boss retired a couple of
years ago.
AA is the lone PC pseudo-geek in a department full
of mainframers. AA likes to play. AA has the best
PC on the desktop as compared to most of anyone else
in the company. AA moves files around. He FTPs them
from/to the MF, zips them, and sends them to other
systems.
AA is viral. He sucks down space. He should NEVER
be accumulating data, yet he can easily eat up
30GB over the course of a project and forget to clean
up after himself. We can't use quotas because he
REALLY does need the space, for a while. So we
will be enforcing expirations on his areas pretty soon.
Most of his work is done via command line FTP on Linux
boxes. I say boxes because he looks around for free space,
goes there, and when it hits under a GB free, he goes and
finds another box.
AA does not read or understand, he mimics. I showed him
how to upload using curl once. A while later someone asked
if he used curl for downloading. He responded that curl
was ONLY for uploading, that it did NOT download.
One of AA's tasks is to move files from our mainframe
to a W2K server in another building. All our local
building are connected by a double fibre loop, at GBIT
speeds.
MF in Building 1
TMP Linux server in Building 2
W2K Server in Building 3
CORP FTP server in Building 1
PARENT FTP server in Canada via internet / T1.
AA logged into TMP, downloaded a couple of hundred
files, zipped them into 9 files, and then FTPed to
CANADA for someone in Building 3 to download them
and then unzip them.
Multiple GB of zip files.
Did I mention this is a timing critical process?
Why? Not sure. I suspect he thought the CORP FTP
server was low on space.
Of course, there is no reason at all that these files
need to be zipped, moved off site, or even touched
by this guy at all.
They can be pulled directly from the MF to the final
box, no additional stops needed.
My favorite sticker comes to mind:
"Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script"
If figure this particular task will take about 5 lines
of logic, bracketed by a few dozen of comments and error
checking, logging, status email, etc.