Sysadmin pilot fish and two of his cohorts arrive at work one day to find that nothing is working on the domain server.
Fish can’t connect remotely, so he logs on locally. A review of the event log shows him that the SYSTEM user permission has been disabled for the C: drive.
“After adding it back on, everything runs properly,” says fish.
But why had it gone missing? “Come to find out that one of the VPs had asked to be added to the domain admin group,” reports fish. “After getting his new privileges he decided that, since he did not know who the SYSTEM user was, they should not have access to the C: drive.
“Needless to say, his admin privileges were yanked shortly after, and all the other servers were reviewed for potential changes.”