Re: Hiring a part-time sysadmin?

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Sat, 2007-06-23 at 15:43 +0200, Olav Vitters wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 23, 2007 at 12:05:59PM +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > Meanwhile, our sysadmins seem overworked, causing understandable delays
> > for simple requests. Now seems like a good time to pay someone so that
> > requests for new accounts, mailing lists, bugzilla products, etc, get
> > done almost immediately.
> 
> New accounts and new bugzilla products are not a sysadmin task. Although
> of course new accounts can be done by someone who is hired (or
> sysadmins), as long as procedures are followed.
> 
> Mailing list setup is broken. Hiring someone to figure it all out might
> be a good idea; because currently I do not setup mailing lists just
> because I do not want to figure out how.
> 
> I'd like to know what this person would do in daily tasks (concretely).
> The ideal sysadmin just makes existing tasks take less amounts of work.

I'm not so interested in the precise job title. I'd just like someone to
do 
a) The simple little administrative things such as accounts, bugzilla
additions, new mailing lists, etc.
b) Relatively simple installations and updates and other stuff that you
are more capable of listing than me.
c) Clever unexpected things that syadmins tend to do, if we find someone
that wonderful, but a) and b) would be quite enough if don't.

Paying someone would mean that their time is reserved for this. I don't
mind if they are partly idle because there isn't enough for them to do -
the purpose of an employee should be to get things done, not to be busy.
I just don't want to wait for things or have to be demanding to
volunteers that don't have time.

> Note that we do can find enough persons willing to be a part time
> sysadmin (without either hiring or specifically requesting). The real
> problem is that usually they aren't known. Further, known persons are
> usually overworked with other things, so making them a sysadmin would
> not help. Don't really see a solution though. Perhaps we should give a
> random person the ability to do lots of damage.
> 
-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com