system-autodeath

[Seth Vidal]

On Sun, 2008-09-21 at 10:23 -0400, James Hubbard wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 12:29 AM, seth vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> > A while back I mentioned a system-autodeath idea for fedora. For some
> > reason I had neglected it but this evening I put it together. If you
> > take a look it is utterly trivial and just uses cron to kill the default
> > route. I'm sure there are limitless ways this will not be perfect but I
> > think it will probably be good enough.
> >
> > http://skvidal.fedorapeople.org/system-autodeath/
> >
> > If you can come up with any way it is broken, let me know, otherwise
> > I'll probably submit it for review.
> 
> Since the primary of user this app seems to be a network admin, I'm
> taking that use case into account during this discussion.
> 
> Wouldn't a better idea be to create a system management app that would
> report some basic things like the system being out of date with
> security patches and the OS ver to central admin server?  The admin
> software could be setup to change default routes based on rules
> specified by the admin that wants it.
> 
> I believe that it's a bad idea to have an app that when installed by
> mistake will cause the system to not work.  If it is installed, the
> user should be forced to change a config file that will enable it's
> capabilities.

As a former sysadmin who maintained a respin on multiple linux distro
releases for people who then installed systems that I did not control
the above is exactly the intent.

If the grad students in the lab who installed the university linux
distro decide to not keep up and monitor their system I would want it to
drop the default route so then, at least, it is only accessible from the
local network.

-sv