Date: Fri, 7 Feb 1997 14:08:01 -0500 (EST)
From: Brian Tao <taob@vex.net>
To: srh@icomm.ca
Subject: Re: SRH: Another security breach

I'm told they hired Guylain Briand, a consultant with Frantel, to do the sysadmin work for them. He knows what he's doing, although the last time he was on contract with ACC, they paid him somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1000/day for three weeks. At that time, he was tasked to investigate the Telebit modem problems (modem lockups, slow connect rates, random disconnects) and do some capacity planning on the network and the systems. This despite already having a network engineering department, a data operations department, and a systems group. Nice to see ACC would rather pay an outsider to do the job their own employees should be handling.

I remember flat-out denying Paul Barrett's request to give this (then) strange root access to all the servers. To paraphrase:

PB:  "Could you give the root passwords to Guylain?"
BT:  "No, absolutely not."
PB:  "He's going to monitor the systems and tell us where we
      need more capacity."
BT:  "I've already made my recommendations.  Are they not good
      enough for you?  Nobody told me we were bringing in a
      contractor for this."
PB:  "Look, I'm paying him $1000 a day to do his job, and you are
      standing in the way."
BT:  "I don't care if Knuth[*] himself came down from the mountain
      and asked for the root passwords.  He's not getting them."
PB:  "I find your attitude very annoying."
BT:  "You have that right."

And on it went. Of course, Guylain and I got along fabulously anyway and we were able to complete the audit without further interruption from management. I distinctly recall that of his entire report (at least a couple dozen pages long), only a few paragraphs were dedicated to the servers. He basically recommended the obvious: add more memory, add more disk, add new servers, etc. His comment was that the servers were the smoothest running part of the operation, and that they required the least amount of his attention. I suppose that's why ACC went and dismantled it all and rebuilt it from scratch. :-/


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