[WikiEN-l] new CheckUser proposal up

Thu Oct 13 17:14:14 UTC 2005

On 10/13/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> You can either try to Taylorise the process of trusting people, or you
> can get in people you trust. Sysadmins *could* do any destructive
> thing they want. But they pretty much *don't*. I wonder why that is.

 If sysadmins can do any destructive thing they want, then you haven't
created a very secure system.
 As for why they don't, it depends which sysadmins you're talking to.
Certainly the fact that their actions are logged and that they'd lose their
job and face criminal charges if they did something destructive has
something to do with the reason a sysadmin at Yahoo or Google is unlikely to
do something destructive.

Usually it works that the sysadmins have the access they need to keep
> stuff working. Around here, where all day every day is a "WTF?!"
> moment, the present process seems to work. I'm sure you can outline
> many reasons why the present way of doing things is utterly broken and
> can't possibly work in theory, never mind that it does in practice.

 Apparently it doesn't work that well in practice, and that's why you're
talking about changing the way things work. From my own experience, the site
is quite flaky, and from your statement above CheckUser sometimes takes 5
hours to process. Doesn't sound like things are working very well to me.

You don't actually know much about systems administration in practice, do
> you?

 I've been the lead administrator for multi-million dollar systems, so yes,
I know a lot about how systems administration works in practice.

- d.

 Anthony