Re: Status of pam-1@ssh.com authentication in OpenSSH?

From: Nico Kadel-Garcia (nkadel_at_comcast.net)
Date: 12/22/03 

Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 09:22:36 -0500

"all mail refused" <elvis@notatla.org.uk> wrote in message
news:slrnbucljo.gcp.elvis@notatla.org.uk...
> In article <bs500a$udg$1@news.hcf.jhu.edu>, Eduardo Duenez wrote:
>
> >I *wish* I could do that. I'm just a poor (and screwed) user. I'm
> >employed by a large organization and getting the IT people to do
> >*anything* (even if it's part of their job specs) is like trying to poke
> >a hole through granite with your bare finger. They are shielded so well
> >from the users (is that a goal per se?) that they can only be reached by
> >leaving a phone message (no e-mail requests for help!) and you *never*
> >get to talk to them unless they call you back (and they choose not to.)
> > It's *UNBELIEVABLE*.
>
> Hey - can I apply for an IT job there ?

Such an environment is usually a matter of policy, not necessarily man-power
shortage. They don't realize that making the users this unhappy gets their
funding cut and can make it worse.

Eduardo, can you make friends with the secretary or paper-work handler for
their department? I got an in at one over-sized workplace by keeping the
secretary's email working, despite the best efforts of their IT department
to break things through incompetence and being unable to handle user
requests due to far more "important" busy-ness. It drove them nuts when she
kept wanting to use *our* departmental system instead of their expensive
server. It made it worse when new departments added to the company wanted to
use it, moo-ha-ha. That got political.....

On a more friendly approach, can you point them to the CERT warnings on
older SSH releases and offer to be the guinea pig to test new installations,
especially if you can encourage them to use the more powerful, flexible,
*cheaper*, and better-supported OpenSSH releases? Any company that relies on
shell-script tools to provide a chroot environment, as ssh.com does, needs
to be shot through the CIO.....