I just read a story on The Register entitled Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over “renegade” Linux maker. Quite hilarious.
Apparently Jerry Taylor, city manager for Tuttle, Oklahoma, noticed that the city’s webpage wasn’t working right. He got the default “test page” for the Apache webserver on CentOS.
Instead of calling the hosting company, he sent a series of vicious emails to CentOS, even threatening to call the FBI. The CentOS folks really went out of their way to help this guy — he was not even their customer. And he repaid them by saying they should have helped him sooner.
Of course, there was the obligatory comment about being computer literate: “I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. Now, can you tell me how to remove ‘your software’ that you acknowledge you provided free of charge? I consider this ‘hacking.'”
The Register story is hilarious, and the original discussion even more so because it includes a full transcript of the event. Favorite quote (to the city manager):
If you will not let me help you, or at least talk to someone who knows what Linux is, then you will look like an idiot.
Your choice.
Should anyone wish to write to the city manager of Tuttle, OK, to complain about his outrageous behavior, his e-mail address is citymgr@cityoftuttle.org. Assuming they have figured out how to properly configure e-mail.
He’s probably not worth his $63k salary and with a personality like this almost certainly isn’t giving his employees the “feeling that we’re ‘working together'” (see that link).
Sigh. Why do people hire a guy like this in the first place?
Terah suggested that I post a translation for those of you that aren’t network admins. So here goes.
Say you recently bought a used car from someone in the classifieds. It’s been running well for you, but after you’ve driven it only 200 miles, it suddenly won’t start. You call up the dealer (who didn’t sell the car to you) and accuse him of vandalizing your car, and threaten to report it to the cops. The dealer tries to help you with your problem over the phone, but you refuse to answer any questions, insisting that you’re going to call out the FBI.
Finally, the dealer sends a mechanic to your house, just to make you go away. The mechanic determines that you haven’t filled up the car with gas. You fill it up, and then call up the dealer to tell them that the car works now, and if they would have just told you to add gas in the first place, they could have avoided all this finger-pointing.
So remember Jerry Taylor, the man from Tuttle, OK that threatened to call the FBI on a Linux vendor because an unrelated hosting company had misconfigured Apache?
Well, this story is just getting funnier and funnier.
First off is this story from t