I’m sure there must be lots written about group system administration, but it doesn’t seem to be written in either the FAQ, the reference or even the venerable FDL’d SAG, so I hope it’s not a(nother) completely silly question. As I was reminded by the Paralysed Perl Package Problem, sometimes other system administrators can really mess you up by changing things without documenting what, how or why they made that change.
My current solution on that system is to put the message “please record any major system changes with the command dch -c /root/changelog --no-auto-nmu -i 'description of change'
” in the /etc/motd
file. I’ve also installed apt-listchanges with a suitable configuration. For TTLLP servers, there’s not a problem because we all use the same task tracker to make notes.
For shared/remote servers, I’d like to have something better than fault-finding and the intrusion detection tools, but stop short of trying to require all system administrators to use a particular version control on the system configuration, or trying to require them to use a centralised bug tracker application. (The other sysadmins work for other people, so we can’t require them to do it and “pay us to manage a repository/bug tracker for your server” is an awkward sell anyway.)
What do you do?
13 Responses to Tools for Group Administration of Debian Systems?