Joshua Penix said:
>
> On Apr 14, 2005, at 12:28 PM, Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade wrote:
>
>> I think what's making this painful for us is that there's no clear
>> definitions of who's responsible for what on sparkplug. At the risk
>> of
>> being shouted down for being a beaurocrat, I think we actually need
>> to
>> create some organizational structure for management of sparkplug,
>> and
>> some
>> clear policies on notifying others of changes made to the club's
>> server/services.
>
> I think the key here isn't so much the organizational structure, but
> the "policies on notifying." Like John said, the sysadmins are
> effectively the people in the sudoers. They're in there because they
> can be trusted not to screw things up too badly. I'd like to hope
> that
> they can be trusted to 1) change system-wide things only if they need
> changing; 2) change them in a way compatible with the system (in our
> case, the "Debian way"), 3) consider the consequences of changes and
> test accordingly; 4) document any such changes and notify other
> interested parties that the changes have been made (a posting to
> -steer
> should suffice).
In this vein I have set up RCS directories for most things I've
changed from CLI. I think it's probably a good idea, since we have
multiple people doing admin work and if you check in your changes, you
can also comment what you changed. It requires some discipline among
those doing the work, I added a reminder to MOTD and turned on motd in
sshd so everyone sees it when they login.
> I've been using -steer recently for such notifications and think it's
> been working well. Greg I know you did the same when you installed
> Amavis, and that also went smoothly. I suggest we simply continue
> along that theme. The mailing lists are the only things which were
> really a problem in the recent past, and again in keeping with the
> notification, John just made Mailman changes and told us here on
> -steer.
We had an admin's list at one time, but it may be redundant. I think
posting to steer is fine.
>> I'd be happy to take on the role of "Friendly Neighborhood
>> BOFH^H^H^H^HSysAdmin" if the other members are happy with it.
>> Between
>> the
>> mailing lists and the web site, there's honestly not all that much
>> to
>> do in
>> terms of maintenance, and I tend to be more easily reached than
>> Josh.
>
> I don't have a problem with this, although I'm not sure if it's fully
> necessary (see above). For now, however, I'd like to keep the website
> portion under my control until I get Plone streamlined and content
> duties delegated. Then I'll be needing your assistance on some of the
> content type creation and whatnot.
The server has always been a collaboritive effort, since it first went
on-line. I nominate Gregory for Sysadmin-in-chief, which is a very
responsible position. Any thing that goes wrong, Gregory is
responsible. :-) Most of the sysadmining in the past has been such
things as keeping the web site up to date (not always done as well as
we would like) and dealing with emergency problems.
Perhaps a list of peope who have physical access to the server should
be distributed, so someone who notices a problem can contact those
people.
--
Neil Schneider pacneil_at_linuxgeek_dot_net
http://www.paccomp.com
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Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who
are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it - Mark Twain
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