Bringing on a new Engineer

With Chris stepping down we'll soon be looking toward adding an additional engineer.

Since we're looking for a very specific set of skills for an engineer, we're thinking of opening an call for applications in TPH to increase the applicant pool.

Its a position that requires a lot of skill and carries a lot of responsibility and trust, so its something we want to discuss before moving forward with it.

How does everyone feel about this? Have any potential candidates in mind? Post them here!

Do you have someone in mind?
Was this discussed int he Admin meeting?
This would need to be someone everyone trusts .......
Makes me nervous but I am for it.
If we do it, I'd be for a long application process to make sure we choose someone who is trustworthy and dependable.

I couldn't agree more but I'm also extremely pessimistic about our prospects of finding suitable candidates. This has been an ongoing problem for far too long now, there's an immense responsibility (burden) to having server access and we can't just give to the first senior mod/admin who comes along and has shown good judgement on the board but has only been around BL for 6/12 months. I don't know the details of what happened with theotherside, but that was a perfect example.

Quite frankly I think in this situation we need to ask for real-life credentials and references, even background checks. This is the only way I think we can find out enough about someone to trust them with the keys to the server and perhaps a discussion that should include SG as the owner.

Even though JB may have been somewhat paranoid about this during his reign, I can't help but feel there was good reason for it. You don't know anything about someone over the net and anyone can fake it well enough to sneak into position to do real damage.

I don't even have time to reply to thisproperly or say that it should be a disucssion for BL, this is kinda a temp forum and I don't want ot have to have to migrate everything over when the upgraede is done.

*takes a breath*

Chris is gone and I'm pretty burnt out right now, I have two job interviews this week, which I'll be fine for but in the long run, yes I need backup but I'm as at as much of a loss about where to look as I was six or twelve months ago on the subject. Actually I thought RL might have been a good prospect but obviously that isn't going to happen.

Good luck guys!

Swerlz seems to know quite a bit about linux... I don't know how much you guys would trust him with admin privs on the server.
Abygale isn't interested - which would have been your ideal solution.

Other than that, I don't think there's anyone on staff that i would consider for the job. But imma leave it up to you guys.

Hoptis... BEFORE taking on someone new... backup, and backup HARD... Get all apache/mysql configs backed up and OFF server. Mysqldump/hotcopy. cp -Rp then tar zxf everything in the /sites directory and take absolutely everything away from the server so you have a SAFE backup.

At least then if someone does do a rm -rf / you're relitively ok.

Chris