On 9/19/2006 9:44 AM, Dave Page wrote:
>> Second, maybe people need to know what those provisions, that are put 
>> into place, are. Right now, as I understood it, the plan is that you 
>> have full access to everything. But Marc made clear that this is only 
>> for emergencies and as long as he is somehow reachable, he's 
>> going to do 
>> the work. Which means, that the only backup person we have is 
>> kept away 
>> as far as possible, instead of actually making sure he/she 
>> can perform 
>> the task in case of emergency just as swift as the main person. This 
>> strikes me as dumb of a plan as having no plan at all, sorry. 
>> This isn't 
>> designed to serve as a backup in case of emergency, this is 
>> designed to 
>> reinforce the status quo.
> 
> No, it's common sense. Marc's day job is running his servers which he
> knows inside out. Mine is running Vale Housing's servers. I'll back up
> Marc as far as the postgresql.org resources are concerned but neither I,
> nor anyone else can be expected to know his systems as well as he does
> and it is inevitable that it will remain quicker and easier for him to
> fix most issues - which in almost every case he does (I woke him at 3AM
> yesterday for example). Similarly I wouldn't expect anyone but a member
> of my staff to be able to fix an issue on a Vale server as quickly as I
> might.

Having a backup admin who never actually responds to these issues unless 
the only person, he could ask for any details, is absolutely unavailable 
is common sense? Absolutely not, not at all. This is a setup that is 
designed to make the backup admin wait as long as possible, before 
actually taking matters into his own hands. And then, since he is 
working on an already extremely escalated problem that might have caused 
one or the other chain reaction failure, he will likely make a few 
mistakes which in turn will be used as an argument to "better wait a 
little longer next time".

An emergency plan that is never exercised or tested is no emergency plan 
and no common sense. It is a theory that waits to be disproved.


Jan

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