“The fact that there is a great divide between what education ought to be and what it actually is suggests that there is someone who is benefiting from the status quo.” – Ms. Melinda Selmys¹

“He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.” – C. S. Lewis, _The Screwtape Letters_

Yesterday I spent my work day converting a number of xen virtual servers into physical servers. There has got to be a better way than what I did, but I do not know of a rescue environment that has rsync installed (to my surprise, I tried several with no luck), and I did not have a usb stick or similar to install an OS on.

That is neither here nor there though. While I was converting, I came across a number of small but indicative things that lead me to believe that the administrators employed by the customer whose servers I was converting are in fact incredibly incompetent. Gah, that was a bad overly clauseful sentence.

Anyway, while nothing I found makes things certain, it was, as I said, certainly indicative. Today, I wake up, and they are complaining that files are missing from a vhost that I did not touch. At all. Sure enough, the file system is mounted but the files themselves are not there.

Looking in history, I cannot prove that they ran the rm -rf themselves. The alternative is that they were hacked. Either way, it feels like a sort of bitter “I told you so” moment, because yesterday I spent a few minutes complaining to Dan about the state of the converted machines, and suggesting he contact the customer about it. I do not think the customer realizes how incompetent his administrators are, nor that he has enough technical skills to interview a system administrator adequately. As a good business partner, I personally feel we owe it to this customer to have given him a heads up. And Dan might have done so for all I know.

Still, it is deeply ironic that we have had a catastrophe the very night after I warn Dan that they are asking for one.

bah.

The term has been used in a couple of UN documents, and the Europe for Christ! network has launched a .eu website to deal with it.¹ Would such a term be useful in dealing with the liberals here? I suspect not.