What is wrong with computers?

by Karel Thönissen

Last week we had system administration week. Most of the week we spent on maintenance of our computers, network and software. Most importantly, we re-installed all our machines. Why are computers so difficult? Why do they behave so strangely? I really do not know.

Let me give you a two examples of the peculiarties that we have experienced. All our work places use identical machines, bought at the same day from the same supplier. When re-installing, the machines are restored to their factory settings they promise. Yeah, right. When doing the restore, one enters some low-level application, written for DOS. This is very basic stuff, and this stuff is supposed to work always, since it is the last resort in case of serious problems. (Having the entire OS on a partition of your PC is nice and comfortable, but I really do not know how to re-install the OS, let alone the applications and documents, when the disk is injured beyond repair.) Anyway, this software is supposed to run independent of Windows, not on top of it. However, I was really surprised that on one of the machines this procedure was in Korean! No idea how that was caused. All machines ran the same software, patches were always applied to all machines, system administration actions were always applied to all machines, yet this one machine decided that it had to talk Korean with me. From something close to the BIOS!

Another nicety is this one. Re-installing a new machine and installing all patches is a job for the system administrator. Thanks to an architectural fault in the design of Windows, installation of software, drivers and patches requires frequent restarting of the computer. I have not counted it, but I think I had to restart the each machine at least a dozen times, before the basics had been installed and the machines were safe for the Internet. These restarts are needed when I am doing my SA-work with my SA-account. However, when the machine tries to restart itself with an SA-account open, I hangs and starts making loud beep noises. I think this is some sort of security measure, but this does not work. If the account is password protected, then blocking a restart does not make sense. When the system administrator has not password-protected the account yet (which is handy during the dozen restart cycles of the re-install and the extended downloads that make screen saver jump in) then the alarm is also pointless. A smart SA is sitting next to the machine and if he is careless and walks away from the machine, then a simple beep is not enough to warn him that another user may now be hijacking his privileges. From a usability point of view there is another problem. I have discovered that the hanging and loud beeping during the restart can be stopped by pressing the power button for a very long time. I am not aware that this was somewhere in the manual of Windows or the ThinkPad. I am only so lucky to know this. However, if I know this, then some others may do so too. So as a protection mechanism it is totally lame: it is a form of security-by-obscurity that fails to protect against the experienced hacker/cracker in your own organisation. Fortunately, these are not the most common, unfortunately, these are the most dangerous.

Maybe I am wrong and this hanging and beeping is not a security feature. But then the question is: why the hell did they not bother to provide the user at least some bit of a clue telling him what is the matter?