[ On Tuesday, March 28, 2000 at 00:19:57 (-0800), John Nemeth wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: more work in rc.d [was Re: rc, rc.shutdown proposed change]
>
> On Jul 5, 12:09am, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> } 
> } I can guarantee to you that not all of the users using NetBSD want to be
> } system administrators and more importantly not all of them should have
> } to be restricted to working in environments where system administrators
> } are available to support them.
> 
>      All servers, regardless of the OS, should be installed and
> maintained by qualified system administrators.

I agree 100%.  However the key word in there is "should".  Remember too
that not all machines running NetBSD are servers.

>  To do so otherwise with
> production servers is extremely foolish and could be far more costly in
> the long run in terms of downtime.  

Yup, but that doesn't stop people from thinking they're either immune to
the inevitable problems, or that they're smarter than the average
non-sysadmin, etc.  Often up-front costs are deferred because they can
be and the fact that future disaster might strike is irrelevant because
it is only a future possibility.

>   I will grant you that there are
> many sites that are too small to have full-time sysadmins; but, that is
> why there are contractors.  

As one of those contractors I can assure you that we do indeed end up
doing costly fire-fighting as a result of lack of attention to various
sysadmin details which almost always could have been handled with less
cost up-front in the first place.  I.e. regardless of the availability
of sysadmins, either in-house or contracted, real-world people often
fail to take advantage of them despite the also availiable evidence that
future problems will cost more to fix as a result.

I think the issue is one much larger than just whether or not a shop
decides to hire a qualified sysadmin vs. ``coercing'' an existing
employee who is, if not also less qualified, focused on their primary
duties.  I read an interesting article in CACM recently ("The Myths and
Realities of Information Technology Insourcing", Feb 2000) about various
techniques at trying to show senior management that IT/MIS departments
are not just cost centres even though their returns are often less
tangible than a black number on the bottom line of the balance sheet and
that insourcing can be cheaper than outsourcing.  The most important
thing I got out of the article though was that senior management is
reluctant to fund IT/MIS departments regardless of whether the work is
done inside or outside and these quotes sum it up pretty well:  "The
Board coud care less about IT.  They treated it like they treated heat
or electricity [services]." and "They are always telling us our
processing for payroll is too damn expensive.  Then when you say `Well
have you looked outside?' [they reply] `Oh yes, we beat the heck out of
them.' so our costs are too high but they can't get it any cheaper."
While this article focused on multi-billion-dollar companies the issues
with convincing senior management about the "value" of IT remain in many
companies of much smaller size too (and contrary to the big companies
often small companies simply cannot afford anything "extra" for IT).

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>