The 7 most dangerous species of net admins

Jeff Dray is back from his latest journey into the IT jungles and he's returned with yet another classification list. This time he's identified the seven most dangerous types of network administrators. Do you recognize yourself in any of these profiles?

If you're lucky, most of your colleagues work hard, do a good job, and are easy to get along with. But there's no denying that there are certain subspecies of network administrators who can make a working environment somewhat... problematic. IT pro Jeff Dray decided to characterize (and caricaturize) a number of these net admin types, such as:

• The gamesmaster: NetopsiaAliatorium. This rarest and probably most affable type of dangerous network administrator used to be found in great numbers in the academic world. The network had sufficient spare capacity to allow a few students at a time to work on their dissertations or research but its main function was to provide a gaming platform for the team that ran the IT facilities for the college.


• Test bed man: NetopsiaExperiortus. This adventurous person tries out new patches and upgrades all the time. Most sensible administrators will have a small test network on which they try out solutions before deploying them to the working system. Mr. Test Bed runs them on the live system, much to the consternation and annoyance of the users.


• My personal property: NetopsiaDictatoris. As the name suggests, the network is this character's personal property, and she will become agitated whenever somebody seeks to do anything that will affect the smooth running of the network. A good thing, you might think, but N Dictatoris takes it too far. She will keep extensive logs that show that network performance is 100 percent. This is achieved by ensuring that hardly any of the resources of the network are allocated for general use.

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