> How about being so protective of your hardware that you are willing to go > to jail to keep others from molesting it? This is a fascinating story...
I think, there's enough blame to go around for everyone in this story. Terry Childs set up a network by himself, and didn't let any of his collegues review the plans for it, let alone administer the network. The worst part is that his supervisors knew about it and everyone in the IT shop accepted it. Sure, someone else asked the question "what happens when he gets hit by a truck" but Childs himself was not responsible enough to ask it of himself. If he loved his "baby" so much, he should have, at least, left an insurance policy ... an envelop with configs, diagrams, passwords etc so that the network could be maintained when he's not around. No one is so smart that they can't bounce ideas with his/her collegues. No single admin, no matter how smart and dedicated he is, should be the sole admin for a critical piece of infrastructure. That's just a major failure in the part of the management. And, his peers should have pointed that out to the management in no uncertain terms. I have worked with someone like that. (He was a Unix admin, not a Cisco admin, so I know he didn't change his name to Terry Childs :-)) Just like Childs, he worked 24x7x365. Never took a vacation. Considered by others (and himself) to be _the_ jack of all trades. Had a terrible temper. No one else had admin accounts for "his" systems. No one questioned his methods. But, finally, when the management changed, he was forced to let others in. Some systems were taken away from him and given to other people to manage. He later left and we spent years cleaning up his messes, his not-so-intelligent design decisions, his unnecessary complications, etc. No one said that he wasn't a dedicated worker. But we, as a unit, are better off now that he is gone. Looks like the same thing happened at the SF mayor's office. The new Security guy saw Childs as a single point of failure and asked for the keys to the kingdom. Some people will argue that the old network/mainframe/unix admin types are uber-geeks who'd rather get the job done than deal with company policies and procedures. I'd say no. Since the time of DARPA and ARPA, those geeks saw the need for RFCs, the standards, the openness. If you are so much of a geek that you'd rather talk to machines than to people, then by all means, use e-mail, IM, internal wikis, message boards, whatever to communicate with your peers and let them know what you are doing and how they can admin/manage the system. After all, the systems are not your personal property. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
