The great and powerful

So I got a taste this week of the POWER OF THE SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR. It's fun adding users who can't use my system until I'm done adding them... and I will be done when I'm good and ready! And only giving users permissions I want them to have. They will have to be nice to me. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Don't make me release the flying monkeys!

I actually had a small bump in the road on my way to becoming the System Overlord, receiving a message akin to this as I tried to install the libdm5-perl component:

Heh, Heh. Oops. It seems I had some trouble unhashing hash marks in last week's unit. Oh, well, not to worry, I just went back and redid all of unit 2's configuring and the second time I attempted to install the libdm5-perl component, I basically got this message:

So, all was right with the universe again, and I went about creating and destroying lives as I saw fit as the SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR!!

Ahem, if you would, please do not tell anyone that while system administrators are great and powerful, like Oz, they are in reality merely men (or women) behind the curtain. In reality, all I was actually doing was following instructions on a little piece of paper (virtual, of course) and adding pretend users to my pretend system. If I were actually in Oz, I might have expressed my week this way:

Oh, you liquidated her, eh? Very resourceful!

I need brains to be a systems administrator. Duh. But in this week's learning, I was once again reminded about using your brains to work through a problem. When I wasn't given permission to download the perl component, I knew I hadn't done something correctly last week. In discussion boards, classmates had said something about doing Unit 3 over. I went back and looked at the assignments-- sure enough, I saw some things about getting permissions. I went back to my first snapshot and started all over again: it worked. And, I was also reminded once again, much like saving your work as you go, take snapshots. It only takes once to learn the lesson. Usually.

I should have felt it in my heart.

I need a heart to be a systems administrator. Or, rather, ethics. Which, luckily, I have. Systems administrators have Super Powers. Powers most people don't even know about. You know that paranoid feeling you get when you rip on a co-worker in a company email? Hang on to it. Systems administrators can read your email. And anything else on your system, except your password, and big whoop on that because they can always reset it, anyway. Systems administrators can determine who can do what on the computer. I suggest you bring them candy and flowers on a regular basis.

You are talking to a man who has laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom and chuckled at catastrophe.

And you need courage. At first, you need courage in abundance. I'm the kind of computer person who feels just enough courage to try things but doesn't have enough brains to pull them off each time. But hey, that's what snapshots are for, right? So as I'm reading about the commands we've used  I'm also fiddling around with commands to see what works and what doesn't. I know from experience that fiddling around with computers is really the only way to understand them. Many of us are self-taught, and we do pretty well, because we learn the tricks as we go. Sometimes the hard way. Right now I think most of us are feeling pretty courageous just using the command line. So, we're getting there!

So while systems administrators are all-powerful, ultimately they are just people behind the curtain who can be revealed by little Scottie dogs and the FTC. And unless they have brains, a heart, and courage, they really won't be very good at their job.

But, please don't tell anyone that because I like them all to be afraid of me. VERY AFRAID! HA HA HA HA HA.


I accept chocolate any day of the week. Goodbye, folks!