On Sun, Dec 23, 2001, Omer Zak wrote about "Guy's Rants about volunteerism": > Recently someone posted and asked for suggestions how to get Linux > experience. He was open to offers to volunteer his time. I am sure there > are several other youngsters in similar situation (before the army, and > wanting Linux and/or Webmastering experience).
While this is true, the person who is given the duty of high-level administration and security policy (rather than short-term work like "just write a script that does '....'") will have to come with a considerable amount of Linux/Unix experience - e.g., from administering a personal Linux machine. Making mistakes that f*cks up the server's operation is quite easy (and frequent) for an inexperience sysadmin. One without considerable experience is also very likely to cause huge security holes, and never discover breakins (some crappy sysadmins think their system is secure just because they don't know it was broken into ;)) > Another important issue which is considered by someone who is > contemplating volunteer work: needed commitment. People with family and > jobs are already fully committed to those. They won't accept lightly > further commitments, if they are serious. However, then something itches > them, they would be willing to scratch the itch. Right. The way we solved this on the machine running ivrix.org.il, is that the same machine also runs the personal home pages and email addresses of the people administering it (e.g., it runs nadav.harel.org.il). These have negligable effect on the amount of bandwidth/disk/CPU wasted, but have a strong effect in keeping the machine relatively well-adminstered (since I'd notice if my homepage suddenly went down, and so on). It can also serve as a small "bonus" to people helping the effort, or even as a way to blackmail them into doing work: imagine you relying on "zak.org" (for example) being served by iglu.org.il, and being told that if you don't keep the mirrors up to date, zak.org would be dropped :) -- Nadav Har'El | Sunday, Dec 23 2001, 8 Tevet 5762 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |The message above is just this http://nadav.harel.org.il |signature's way of propagating itself. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
