No Sysadmin shoud be playing games on the systems he/she uses for admin work.

I once heard a (probably apocryphal) story of a developer who had been playing Doom installed on a server.

The sysadm caught him playing it and promptly unistalled the game.

However the important business application hosted on the server then stopped working and no one could figure out why.

Nothing would work... even after lots of debugging, error log analysis and redeploying.

The developer suggested installing Doom again and lo and behold, the application started working.

If someone tells you that story, they have to explain why.

It was actually a common problem back in the day.

Software would ship with shared DLL's, uninstalling an application would usually have a knock on effect.

MS-DOS was used a lot for small office servers. Whilst Windows NT4 was growing in popularity, it was an expensive option for firms. Plus it was hard to play games on NT4 due to memory protection issues.

A fable of Doom being needed to run a server in today's environment is ridiculous, however back then things were a lot less mature. The issue wasn't limited to just games. Any application with shared files was a nightmare, normally you just renamed files, rebooted, then if things worked you could delete the files.

Oh, I so wish that were true.

Heck, back in the day I caught someone (thankfully not at the place I worked) running a game (some FPS) server on their exchange server box. Running Steam is well within the realm of possibilities.

At one building, friends and I rigged every machine to have hidden copies of Alien vs Predator and Everquest. I modified the system software to intercept keystrokes before they got to the game. One command crashed video, audio, and then whole system. I also set others to randomly crash around same time people walked in to supervise what was going on. Friends and I griped our machines were down about every day. Person in charge ordered us to keep using them and get no replacements because that served wiseasses like us.

Oh, yes it did. Served us well. (evil grin)

Note: Also embedded web browser into our business application in development-mode only. The GUI forms and such. Policy had IE locked down but embedded browser still worked lol. So, fast coders got the job done quickly then were bullshitting around on Internet till someone approached. One key stroke and back to boring UI testing. ;)

Since I alternate between developer and system admin jobs[1], you message hits me both as "Righteous" and "Dammit you $^%& developer". I am so conflicted.

1) welcome to the wonderful and horrible world of a journeyman in the middle

I try to stay in those grey areas where people sort of want to stop me but find my antics too useful or entertaining. :) Far as that setup, sysadmin was a pal of mine who hated the unreliable crap he had to manage. He had already made sure all the work sync'd to their Novell network's central storage. I also told people to make CD backups with the CD burners on the machines. With my help, people just lost time here and there with him not having to do any extra work.

So, sysadmin was thanking me for helping him deal with machines that were inexplicably always crashing "because Acer machines are garbage." You feel more or less conflicted now? :P

Sadly, these days, the Acer machines are the least problematic of the machines (looking at you H "100 hard drive failures out of 120 machines" P) I have to deal with.

[edit] I feel about the same, as a system admin, I get bit in the /\$$ way too often by good intentions. I hear they pave a road with them (I think I worked there).

The steam uri handler probably has lots of avenues of easy RCE.