Lan Barnes wrote:
On Sun, July 20, 2008 12:43 pm, SJS wrote:
begin quoting Bob La Quey as of Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 06:18:23PM -0700:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brad Collins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 10:48 AM
Subject: Terry Childs Coverage
To: Bob La Quey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
It would be interesting to hear reactions about this from
the folks on kplug
[snip]
http://news.oreilly.com/2008/07/coverage-of-terry-childs.html
This eemed to me a mail list story given the number of
system admins who hang around here.
Comments?
The more information that comes out, the worse the City looks; the
suggestion of sacking all of SF's IT management (and I'd go a little
higher than that as well) seems to make a lot of sense. Terry sounds
like an irascible sort of person, but part of a manager's job is
learning how to handle such people.
It looks like he was a good administrator, in that he was protective of
his users (The System Must Stay Up) and probably overworked. And it
looks like the management was more interested in turf wars and politics
than keeping the system working, so he assumed the responsibility.
Then someone tried twisting his arm, and he didn't kowtow properly.
Hijinks ensue.
Is he the guy who brought SF down? No time to read it.
Sysadmins who mess up systems are the moral equivalent of doctors who kill
patients.
He did neither. In fact, the system has apparently continued to run
flawlessly through all of the idiocy.
Basically it boiled down to management saying "Give us the passwords."
and the admin saying "No. You have no need to know and you'll just
screw up my network." That is his prerogative.
At which point they fired him. That is their prerogative.
He should have turned over the passwords on leaving. However, given the
hubbub, turning over the passwords could erase evidence that he didn't
do anything wrong. So, not turning over the passwords until there is a
proper procedure to protect the evidence is probably legally defensible.
Bit of a sticky situation. My guess is that SF is going to have to
cough up some money in the end.
-a
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
