I had the pleasure today of cleaning up the mess of an admin at the hosting company of one of my clients. Unfortunately, this tends to be a normal affair, but not typical of this parciular hosting company (names have been changed to protect the identity of those involved ;-)).

Yesterday, the client requested that the host fix their awstats cron-job to run more effeciently (apparently awstats was broken). While doing this, the manually exected job filled-up /tmp due to the fact that the bright individual forgot to comment-out the hourly executed cron-job that accompanied it.

Today, another admin gets the complaint that php session data isn't being stored properly. He "researches" the issue and determines that /tmp is full. His actions are what blow me away! /tmp was a 2GB filesystem. Instead of cleaning up the filesystem, determining what was filling it, and address that issue (especially considering that the previous admin who is the guy's teammate is what filled it to begin with), he decides that a reboot is in order. Along with rebooting, he unmounts /tmp so that / can be filled by their top-knotch support center rather than /tmp.

Ahh, the wonders of dealing with people who run production servers like they administer their Linux desktops. Special thanks for those hosting companies for employing these jokers and most of all for giving them root!