Note: Tagged “general” because the fediverse is disproportionately in favor of Linux/FOSS.
In the past, I wouldn’t hold this opinion, but as Windows has become increasingly dumbed down and clouded up, it’s become something of a sore spot to deal with Windows folks.
If something goes wrong and you ask a Windows admin for logs? Good luck. In all fairness, Windows logging is pretty terrible if the software uses the Event logger. Still, pulling logs or checking for obvious issues along those lines is a foreign concept to 90+% of them. Their first action is to reboot. If that doesn’t fix it, go crying to the vendor.
I liken them to “button pushers” who don’t know or care how the button works, why the button works, etc. Is it possible, or even likely, that Windows creates more clueless badmins by sheer size of their market share? Absolutely. But the real problem is that few of them seem intent to actually learn what’s going on under the hood, how, or why. By and large, they care only that when they click “this” button, “that” happens.
I had an agent spike CPU on some *nix boxes the other day. Straight to VMWare they went with the ticket. Why? Because the hosts were spiking too. Zero local investigation. Makes me mental because no matter what kind of enterprise agreements you’ve got for support, they assume you’re a complete moron as a result of activity like that.
Your opinion is pretty commonplace among Linux users, and as much as I appreciate the work you do, you should know there’s a lot of people in the windows world who are very competent - and don’t look down on other people simply because their tool of choice is different.
It’s not so much the tool of choice I’m judging, just the…intellectually non-curious types that tend to use it.
That anecdote reminds me of a recent one. We had a data exchange setup with an outside party. They put in a ticket saying our sending node wasn’t working. Of course, we investigate, and it’s definitely sending. Logs showed the outbound request and the successful response from their node.
We tell them our side is working fine. They said “no, it’s not.” So I pull the logs again showing that, yes, it IS working.
Didn’t hear from them for a couple of days. Finally the came back and said “All good. The C: drive was just full”
Ah, fair enough. That’s true. I’m looking at a client now with 1/3 of the company given domain admin soooooo… your point is made.
Wait do I upvote or downvote if I agree. Lmao
Wait do I upvote or downvote if I agree. Lmao
I’m a mod here, and I don’t even know 😆. Whatever suits you lol.
Even for the internet, this is stupid.
And yet Linux still doesn’t have an answer to administering large organisations through a mechanism similar to AD or GPOs
For AD, there’s Samba and SSSD. If you want something way more granular, you can do LDAP + Kerberos. I’ve had the latter running my stack since 2015. I’ve even got all my DHCP, DNS, Asterisk, XMPP, Matrix, and Postfix/Dovecot config/users backed by LDAP, so I’ve basically got the equivalent of an AD + Exchange + Cisco Unified Communications server going.
For GPO, though, fair point. Though with SELinux/AppArmor, proper group setups, and a good base configuration, is GPO really needed? It’s also way easier in Linux to just make a secured base image and deploy it to a fleet of PCs. Tools like Ansible can (and are) also used for config and state management for mass deployments (and mostly filling the same role as GPO).
Been a while since I looked into the GPO equivalent, but in general, Linux doesn’t try to micromanage endpoints to quite that degree (e.g. THOU SHALT NOT CHANGE THE DESKTOP WALLPAPER).
The thing about Windows it’s a nightmare to administer. Everything is thrown everywhere. There’s like 4 generations of admin controls. Need to make a change? Depending on what it is, you need to go to the GPOs,DISM,Registry, [JD]Power Shell, run some dumb program from system32 or maybe you need to download toolkit. It’s a mess. The smart admins realize this is bullshit and convince management to buy a 3rd party tool that promises control.
Whatever pays the bills.
You’re right, most of them don’t care to learn how everything works at a deep level. But if you are one of the few that do, you can make bank.
Source: Retired at 49.
“Windows admin” is an oxymoron. it’s not possible to administer windows. It’s spyware. It administers you.
You administer Windows like you would administer poison.
