ITIL OSA course

[malvolio]

ITIL itself makes a great deal of sense, if you read the books. Unfortunately is seems that the organisations most overzealous about embracing it are the ones most desperately in need of a magic bullet. What most of them need is actually a lethal injection.

Delivering which, actually, is mostly what I do for a living...

Where ITIL doesn't work is where the management haven't properly understood what it does. And middle managers in the UK these days are generally so dire that they routinely look for things to hide behind: since most people don't really get ITIL it is the usual scapegoat.

[doodab]

Ah sun kit

The 15k's belonged to Vodafone and there was a very lucky sun admin who had 2 concurrent contracts running them for different parts of the business. It wasn't me. I was trying to defend Vodafone live but the guy was legend...

Not as good as the wheeze at Bristol and west who bought one by accident and then spent a fortune on security software that turned out to be freeware... 100k to install tripwire where was I when that job got handed out...

At one point I was singlehandedly ahead of about 20 sovereign countries in the SETI league tables thanks to spare cycles on assorted sun kit. I even had cron jobs to start and stop it overnight when the machines were otherwise idle. I wrote those after someone told me off

Ah the recklessness of youth

[doodab]

Where ITIL doesn't work is where the management haven't properly understood what it does. And middle managers in the UK these days are generally so dire that they routinely look for things to hide behind: since most people don't really get ITIL it is the usual scapegoat.

Indeed. If it wasn't ITIL it would be some other perfectly good ideas being ****ed beyond recognition and turned into buzzwords and bulltulip.

[Sysman]

I think there are too many people in the industry today and I regularly found myself asking spares what they were doing in my meetings at my last place and service management was nearly always the answer. It's not all balls of locks but my mate once put it as a method of turning a team of 5 into 25 without any identifiable improvement or benefit.

Ideal for empire building then.

[Sysman]

Ah sun kit

The 15k's belonged to Vodafone and there was a very lucky sun admin who had 2 concurrent contracts running them for different parts of the business. It wasn't me. I was trying to defend Vodafone live but the guy was legend...

I used to know a Sun guy like that. He and his missus made a friggin fortune out of one client.

When they finally showed him the door it was time to sell their shares, because it was obvious which direction they were headed.

Not as good as the wheeze at Bristol and west who bought one by accident and then spent a fortune on security software that turned out to be freeware... 100k to install tripwire where was I when that job got handed out...

What many people don't realise is that you can charge for freeware as long as you package it correctly, and despite what the zealots say there is nowt in the GPL and associated licences that vetoes that.

[Sysman]

At one point I was singlehandedly ahead of about 20 sovereign countries in the SETI league tables thanks to spare cycles on assorted sun kit. I even had cron jobs to start and stop it overnight when the machines were otherwise idle. I wrote those after someone told me off

Ah the recklessness of youth

I was once asked to donate cpu to SETI, though didn't dare do so.

We had some rather beefy systems which essentially did nothing except for 3 or 4 days a month but for that 3 or 4 days they ran flat out.

It was very tempting to put them to other use for the rest of the month...