I stumbled across this post that I had saved from the list a couple of years ago, and I think it fits very well with the recent discussion on LOPSA activism.
David Lang ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2008 09:42:06 -0600 (CST) From: Chris St. Pierre <[email protected]> To: John Stoffel <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected], [email protected] Subject: Re: [lopsa-discuss] Looking for rant on why NOT to use first.last@domain aliases On Tue, 4 Mar 2008, John Stoffel wrote: > I see both sides of this arguement, and what I was proposing was the > LOPSA be an organization to bring up and document the issues and > possible solutions to this name space collission issue. We can > suggest and recommend various solutions, but at least pointing out the > issue is a CIO friendly whitepaper type document would be a big step > forward for us as a profession. Agreed. It might be germane to note that whitepaper != position paper. I.e., LOPSA doesn't _need_ to take a position on whether first.last@ addresses are "good" or not to publish on it. We could publish something that says basically what Cat said: You need a policy. That policy should make sure that email addresses are unique. It should plan for contingencies, exceptions, and difficult decisions -- e.g., guys with messed up last names like 'St. Pierre' who might break scripts that assume that the [single] period is the delimiter. And we could discuss pros and cons, because Lord knows any system has them. (If there weren't any cons to a given system of email address assignment, this would all be written down in RFC 822 or something.) We could empower organizations to make informed decisions about policy _without_ trying to make those decisions for them. And we could wrap it all up in a C*O-friendly whitepaper with a pretty logoand charts and graphs and circles and arrows, and a paragraph on the back of each page explaining what it was, since this decision _will_ be made at the C*O level. I think that's the most useful thing we could do to help sysadmins in this area: help them help their management make smart decisions, not dictate to them what decision should have been made. Chris St. Pierre Unix Systems Administrator Nebraska Wesleyan University _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
