orphaned machines

[dninja at gmail.com (Robin Wood)]

2009/3/30 Dan McGinn-Combs <dgcombs at gmail.com>:
> In my limited experience, people, sysadmins and developer alike, remember virtual machines. Especially when they 
> require someone to turn them on or eat developer workstation resources.
> Dan

I wasn't thinking virtual I was thinking real ones where one gets put
under a desk or in a spare bit of rack and then forgotten about. Being
a server it would never be shutdown or rebooted so would just run and
run.

Robin

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robin Wood <dninja at gmail.com>
> Sent: Monday, March 30, 2009 5:19 AM
> To: PaulDotCom Mailing List <pauldotcom at mail.pauldotcom.com>
> Subject: [Pauldotcom] orphaned machines
>
> Hi
> In one of the last couple of episodes Larry mentioned machines which
> were orphaned when people left a company, my immediate thought was
> along a different track to what was discussed so I thought I'd mention
> it.
>
> What about temporary machines which are setup by sys-admins for
> specific jobs or departments when the sys-admin leaves. Maybe a
> developer needed a server with a specific version of mysql on it to
> test a bug, the machine gets put on the network as a temporary thing
> but then the sys-admin who does it leaves and the developer finishes
> his testing and forgets about it. I can think of quite a few scenarios
> where pet projects or temporary machines are forgotten about or lost
> when someone leaves.
>
> I supposed one solution to this is to make sure that every machine
> that gets added to a network is logged but in reality I think people
> are likely to be lazy and for short term installations bypass the
> paperwork. An alternative is to scan the network regularly and pick up
> any machines which are new or not in an approved list and have them
> checked out. The problem with this is that once the machine is vouched
> for once it becomes a recognised part of the network so wouldn't be
> picked up as an anomaly.
>
> So, that was my thought when orphaned machines were mentioned.
>
> Robin
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