SCN: Responsibility (was: Re: A Preliminary Review of SSL)

[J. Johnson]

The question is:  who has _responsibility_?  I wrote:
> > For example, suppose that one of our disk partitions keeps filling
> > up (let's call it '/home0') ....
> > Who's responsible for fixing this?

And then Rod wrote:
>    That sure rings a bell. I untarred a file in home0/webadm the
> other day, and it filled up all available space, so I had to
> delete the whole thing and punt.

  You have to give Rod credit--he's not shy of stepping up and possibly
catching a bullet. 

  However, the _fault_ (and any inferred duty of fixing the problem) is
not Rod's. There's some 130 users on /home0.  One has some 270 MB
allocated, another has 90 MB, and some half-dozen others (all old-time SCN
volunteers) have over 20 MB.  Rod isn't even in the running.

So what to do?  Well, that biggest user is majordomo, with its archives of
all the SCN mailing lists.  Do we tell people to send less list mail?  Or
do we dump some archives?  ("Whoaa", someone says, "that's a policy
issue!".  So what is policy, and who determines it?)  The second biggest
user says he's saving a lot of files of historical importance to SCN--and
who am I to say different to him?  Or to anyone else?  

I would not feel shy about deleting a particular file whose presence was
obviously (??) impairing system performance.  But how can any one of the
900+ MB of files on /home0 be held more at fault that any other?  

Rod asks how he can support me "in doing this".  Thanks, but doing what? 
Enforcing disk quotas?  The shell users don't have any!  And why me?  I've
taken on some system administration tasks, but does that stick me with
the rest?  

My point is:  _no one_ is required to do anything about this, or is
answerable for the problem, because that responsibility has never been
assigned.  (And the problem doesn't overly concern me much as my files are
on a different partition.) 

(I believe Rod was looking at having /home0 moved to a larger partition. 
Well, that's a possible solution, albeit temporary, and I believe Randy
has been considering that.  But my point remains:  neither Randy, nor I,
nor anyone else is required to do anything about this problem.)

As to the 130 some users on /home0, I would offer the same response that
the Board gave me when I tried to get some responsibilities assigned:
work it out amongst yourselves.  You've all got a stake in a shared
resource, you have a language in common, so with liberal democratic
theory and the latest in economic thinking, surely you can come up
with a plan so cogent that some of you will voluntarily delete files to
make room for everyone.  It's a piece of cake, right?

=== JJ =================================================================



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