On Mon, 24 Dec 2001, guy keren wrote:
> > Would it save Guy's time (and the time of other busy volunteers) if newbie
> > volunteer/s join and perform more routine tasks (if necessary,under the
> > supervision of the oldtimers)?
>
> great. so now i'll have to:
>
> 1. explain to people who to do stuff.
> 2. fix their mistakes.
> 3. run after them, checking what they did and that it's ok.
> 4. go to actcom's offices every time someone breaks the system.
>
> sorry, i veto that, unless you do all the mentoring work, and find
> someone else to go fix the machine after it breaks (and it will). i'm
> willing to go fix the machine after it breaks only in 2 cases:
Guy, sorry, I can't buy this rant anymore.
On one hand you are ranting that people are not helping.
On the other hand, you are erecting high barriers of entry for people who
may justify spending time on helping.
In any good organization based upon volunteer work, it is known that one
of the benefits people get from volunteer work is the experience they get
in the process. IGLU is not an organization, but the same principle
applies.
> 1. i broke it.
> 2. i trust the person who broke it, and thus assume this breaking was
> a possible (yet rare) accident.
> 3. it was broken due to hardware problems.
I suggested that the source code and scripts of the www.iglu.org.il be
made available for read-only access. One of the things that people may
volunteer to do (including me) is to make small improvements, which will
eventually make the system more friendly to newbie sysadmins.
> we have a mixed situation here - on one hand, this machine is supposed to
> give a service, and people expect it to work. on the other hand - its a
> sever for the community, and part of this is allowing the community to
> learn about system administration. you're combining the worst of both
> worlds :)
I hope that adding one more goal will improve the situation:
Develop tools which will make the serer easier to administer by newbie
sysadmins - such as tools which will grep the logfiles and recognize
90% of the possible problems.
Of course, this will be accomplished by volunteers who cannot make heavy
commitment, but can contribute little bits of time here and there.
> > How feasible is to keep a backup of the scripts and config files to be
> > able to recover from newbie's screwups (except for the mirror disks, of
> > course)?
>
> its feasible only if you're in a workplace, and cleaning up after newbies
> is part of your job. its not feasible for remote administration on one's
> spare time, unless one realy wants to do this cleaning up.
One important part of oldtime volunteers' mission is to assist in getting
new volunteers trained. Consider the above to be part of this mission.
> so what this all comes to:
>
> 1. root password should only be given to people with experience, or those
> that have proved useful and donated enough of their time, that others
> will feel ok with cleaning up after them.
No problems with that. Newbie sysadmins can still be useful if they
routinely monitor system logs and the like - things which need only
read-only access. The experienced sysadmin will then actualy do the
fix-up work based upon information from the newbies.
> 2. less-experienced users could be given a responsibility of maintaining
> something that does NOT require root password, and that is rather
> secluded. in this case, they still need to have experience as linux
> users, and to be dependable.
If you (or even the newbie) can tuck away a backup of the subsystem, then
this won't be as critical. If it is not something that a simple tar xvf
cannot restore, then let the community improve the subsystem until it
becomes something that tar xvf can restore.
> so i repeat- are there volunteers, or aren't there? so far all i see is
> talking and general talking. behdad offered to write the run-rsync shell
> script, and thus i'll forward the description of the script to him. this
> still doesn't resolve the issue of actually maintaining the mirror itself
> (and i'm reluctant to open accounts for people whose sysadmining abilities
> i've never experienced - source code i can still read before installing).
Why not make the run-rsync script made available for all of us to read and
comment? (Since now it has an "owner", I am now speaking about other
scripts and configuration files).
Either you keep things in secret from the general community and accept the
price of not having many volunteers, or you open up and only then rant if
enough volunteers don't come up.
As I remember, when there were Linux booths in exhibitions, there were
several volunteers. And those projects were as open to the community as
possible.
--- Omer
There is no IGLU Cabal. Some volunteers were too busy to volunteer to
manage other volunteers. So more volunteers were not getting trained or
supervised. So only experienced volunteers could further the goals of
this nonexistent organization. When they all died off due to old age,
well, this was the end of it.
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