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Re: Volunteer administrators (was: Re: Guy's Rants about volunteerism)
Hey Everyone,
I haven't had the time to follow all these emails about volunteering/helping
iglu, But I do have alot of free time, in general, and am willing to
participate in any way I can.
My servers, are only on two 128K ISDNs, so I can't really host anything big,
but I can probaby administer some stuff and I am definately willing to
provide hardware without charging my share wich means very low prices.
Thanx,
On Monday 24 December 2001 14:35, Ely Levy wrote:
> I agree with most of the e-mail but I don't think it should be so
> aggressive. I had a long talk with Nadav harel last night,
> about the purpose of iglu and the ways to accomplish that.
> the diffrance is between what guy think the purpose is to what Omer
> and me think it is.
>
> community?locale?hebrew?pushing linux?supporting newbies?meeting place for
> expert?those things need to be defined in order for people to participate.
> I strongly suggest in making a doc describing it having it vote on and be
> put on as the "official" thing.
>
> then we could work according to a specific line that was chosen
>
> Ely Levy
> System group
> Hebrew University
> Jerusalem Israel
>
> On Mon, 24 Dec 2001, Omer Zak wrote:
> > 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 nowi'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 yourjob. 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.
> > WARNING TO SPAMMERS:at http://www.zak.co.il/spamwarning.html
> >
> >
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