The seven sins of the lazy sysadmin - part seven

David M Williams
Monday, 29 March 2010 13:15

Opinion and Analysis

I've seen too many system admins take lazy shortcuts in their work. Here are seven things which bug me. They should bug you too. If you do them, stop it.

I'll start relatively mild at the bottom - #7 - and work to the top - #1 - over the next few days.

For our North American readers #7 won't be a problem for them. Oh, but for the rest of the world, there are definite small catches to using operating systems primarily developed in the USA.

Microsoft has taken steps to improve this little point in Windows Server 2008 and in Windows Vista and Windows 7 on the desktop, but for previous versions there are a frustrating three places you need to change the default language on installation.

You will be prompted for regional settings when stepping through a Microsoft operating system installation. The default is English (US). It's bad enough that people - who ought to be qualified, experienced, systems administrators - ignore this one but the problem is compounded when you realise clicking the various tabs and buttons yields another two places where regional settings can be changed (namely, for input devices and for system Unicode applications.)

Where I live, in Australia, it's especially easy to set the right region. Just click on the drop-down list and press 'E' once. 'English (Australian)' is the very first entry beginning with the letter 'e'.

Does it matter, you may ask? Well, yes. Besides the fact it's sloppy not to do it, asking if it matters essentially is the same as asking why Windows even prompts for this.