Do you control your web server?
I noticed this tweet today by Kyle James saying his web team needs control of his webserver. I’m curious about server access at various institutions.
At our institution, the server is under the management of our technical services team. They manage backups, patches, updates, and monitor the health of the server. I’m responsible for the site, and any software that I install on there, like custom web apps that our team develops. Our team in Public Affairs manages content, design and everything public facing.
I have root access to our web server. I imagine that’s uncommon but I have a good working relationship with our technical team and the necessary technical knowledge to know what I’m doing and not break stuff.
What’s your setup – and what kind of access do you have?
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Our webserver is actually hosted off campus, by a company called CrystalTech, and Communications & Marketing (the office I’m in) pays the monthly bills. Having a technical background (I’ve got an A+, Network+, and am a MCP), I know a little bit about server administration. It isn’t even that our IT department controls our webserver. We have a side branch that has control, maybe even a rogue office if you want to go that far.
Let’s just say there is a lot of political reasons and it’s quite frustrating when people have the ability to do things backdoor without you even knowing and they also don’t spend the courtesy to tell you that they are doing things. It’s definitely a problem for those reasons, but also when we need to upgrade software on the server or whatnot with the test site and simply can’t. Despite all that, most annoying is when the server goes down and as the calls come in you can’t even resolve the issue instead having to contact this other party to resolve the issue.
I keep thinking to myself there is no way something like this happens in the real business world.
That’s interesting you farm it out. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about doing that myself, as my on-site server warranty expires next month. Will blog that soon.
We don’t have root, but we can control httpd through sudo, which is handy for when we make config changes and need to reload. But, it sounds like our setup is very similar. We own the file system and have our own perl/php CPAN/PEAR setups that we control without needing root. All in all, it works out okay.