[ale] NanoPC

[Beddingfield, Allen]

The problem we have is that we end up acting as more a central hosting provider at times...  we have so many disjointed areas around campus doing things on their own...they go and have someone develop a site for them, THEN put in the request for us to host it.  We don't have a central web development team, although we have pockets of web developers who know what they are doing, and for the most part, they run critical sites.  Right now, we have 500+ WordPress sites, and one of our Security employees spends a good portion of his time trying to get people to patch their WordPress before it gets hacked, etc...
Yay.
Allen B.

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Allen Beddingfield
Systems Engineer
The University of Alabama
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From: ale-bounces at ale.org [ale-bounces at ale.org] on behalf of Jim Kinney [jim.kinney at gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2014 10:37 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] NanoPC

On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 11:27 AM, Beddingfield, Allen <allen at ua.edu<mailto:allen at ua.edu>> wrote:
I'm constantly arguing with boneheaded web developers who go and do their development on the latest bleeding-edge release of Ubuntu, Fedora, or OpenSUSE on a VM on their workstations, then expect me to upgrade the PHP on our SLES servers to that version on their test VM.
At this point, I have to point out that we provide test/dev space on an identical server to production for a reason...and then they stomp and rant and rave, and I have to escalate to management and let them tell them "not just no, but hell no" on pulling in unsupported PHP packages or setting them up a special Debuntu VM for their site.
Bleeding edge releases + web developers = a deadly combination and a huge security problem.
Allen B.

That's always an issue. I changed our HPC stack from CentOS to Fedora to avoid a mess of broken lib issues. At least these don't see public traffic. PHP is scary enough without running the latest developer versions on a public site.

I call those developers "lazy and soon to be unemployed". Provide them a mirror environment of the production realm to develop in and if they can't make it work, they can explain whey the design needs to change or they can work somewhere else.

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James P. Kinney III

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.
- Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain

http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/