I've had a few interesting anecdotes about some of the network administrators i've had to deal with over the years and figured they were worthy of a sidebar post. As a programmer i find that your clients network admin can either be your greatest ally at the company or a complete pain in the ass. You know the ones i mean, they have a couple of microsoft certificates and think they know everything about computers but actually know nothing.
A project i was working on a year or so back was porting a large risk management system from a php/mysql on linux to sql server .net application(much more enterprisey). Anyway we needed a dump of the mysql database in order to import some of the old data into sql server. Knowing that the network admin guy was a windows boy i sent him an email with intructions on how to use mysql dump ie. mysqldump -u<database username> -p <database name> > somefile.sql (that's just off the top of my head and may not be the exact syntax but you get the idea)
So we wait for a week and a few emails go back and forth etc. and finally they ask if i can come in and do it, so we charge crazily high consulting rates and i go in to do it. I putty into the linuxbox and as you do the first thing i do is press up to see the previous command he has just pasted in the exact line from my email, i keep pressing up and realise he's tries doing it about twenty times without realising you might need to replace <database username> with an actual database user and <database name> with the actual name of the database. I mean seriously this guy calls himself a network admin and he can't work that out!!!11!1!!
Anyway i do the dump into a file and then he hits me with the fulll force of his incompetence. He says that there is no way to get the file off the computer because it's a linux file and we are on a windows machine!!!1!1! At that point my jaw just dropped, this guy didn't even understand what a file was, he thought because it was on a linux machine there was no way it could be moved to or used by a windows machine. I installed winscp copied the file and burnt it to a dvd and totally blew his mind in the process.
A few months later we had another issue with the same guy, it was the classic works on the developement server but not on live server issue. We don't have access to the live server and can't debug on it but he insisted fervently(in emails CCed to all the senior managers that the boxes were set up exactly the same). I eventually tracked the problem down to the fact that he had serving to localhost turned off on the live server. When we asked him to turn it back on he said he couldn't because browsing on local host was a security risk?!!?!! When i asked him why he just sat there and mumbled some complete bs about windows users and permissions. He kept insisting that he would not turn it on for security reasons and that we would need to rewrite + retest that part of the application. We gave them a quote for the change and the senior managers ended up telling him to turn it on. Maybe i'm missing something here but i can't think of any circumstance where serving a page on localhost would constitute a security risk, i mean if some 1337 haX0r has localhost access there's more serious things to worry about than him looking at pages on the webserver?
Wow that totally turned into a massive rant, sorry about the length. Maybe i'll put some of the other ones into another post.