On Sat, Dec 16, 2000 at 10:50:00AM +1100, Dennis wrote:
>The IT manager likes throwing "What happens if you get hit by a bus" at
I'd answer that question with "Another tech follows my documentation".
If you document the common tasks you're doing for day-to-day maintenance
and operations, it's really not a problem... QMail runs very well at a
lot of places that don't have QMail experts working there... If you get
hit by a bus *AND* a QMail emergency comes up, you can either refer them
to, or have in place an agreement with one or more of the consultants
listed on www.qmail.org (shameless plug ;-).
On the one hand, the question of relying on something you can't support
is legitimate. On the other hand, I think it's often used as an excuse.
Just because the software you select runs under MS doesn't mean that
one of the existing techs can just pick it up and deal with it, without
a similar learning curve to doing the same sort of thing for QMail.
That, of course, depends on the level of automation, documentation,
and their willingness to work with something new.
As an example, a few years ago we were called in to manage a group of
machines in an emergency. The Unix systems posed basicly the same
amount of problem as the Windows machines (except that the Unix machines
never crashed on us ;-). The Unix machines were running Roxen where
I only had experience with Apache, so it was a learning experience all
the way around. In this case, we effectively had no access to their
existing techs, and there was no documentation other than passwords.
Sean
--
"The big bad wolf, he learned the rule. You gotta get hot to play real cool."
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python
