I used to do work kind of like this stuff on enterprise storage arrays that ran a modified BSD. We didn't lock the system down much, so customers could go and s

I used to do work kind of like this stuff on enterprise storage arrays that ran a modified BSD. We didn't lock the system down much, so customers could go and set whatever system guts stuff they wanted. We had a tool on-system that would basically tar up all the system configs and phone home with them when the customer hit a button. You'd better believe that one of my first steps investigating anything was diffing the crap out of any relevant configs against a clean base version. As another commenter mentioned, this was the result of customers never actually mentioning their weird sysctl tuning in the original issue description. It's not like they're trying to screw you over or anything - there's just an awful lot of config options in an entire system that does anything interesting, and in the case of a big enterprise appliance, it's likely that dozens of people have had admin on it at one point or another.