Boggles

I came into work this morning and my graveyard coworkers had a problem. They had four new servers installed in the data center all running the new $COMPANY approved version of Red Hat Linux, and they couldn't ssh to the machines. The problem felt familiar, and after trying to log in my self I was pretty sure I had seen this before, but I couldn't remember when or where. Was this something wrong with PAM or OpenSSH?

We've used this version of Red Hat on a few previous projects so I began looking around on our Wiki and starting the excruciating exercise of "Advanced" Find in LookOut. With in about two minutes I had found the answer on the Wiki. The standard $COMPANY sshd_config has some options off that we use.

So I had seen this problem before. In fact I had even documented the existence of this problem and how to fix it. THANK YOU WIKI.

After demonstrating that this problem shouldn't have taken eight hours to fix, one of the graveyard Systems Administrators (a term I use loosely) said that the documentation was "incomplete". I hadn't included that sshd needed to be restarted and how to do it. The reason I hadn't documented it was that if you were qualified to do this job you would know that this needed to be done.

At this point I almost lost it. Instead I went to get some coffee, and find a dart board.