[H-SASIG] Erasing data on excalibur

[Russell Stuart]

On Fri, 2010-05-07 at 12:08 +1000, David Formosa wrote:
> Arn't we talking about a wiki here?  Isn't it implicit in the fact that 
> the people have been given change permissions to the wiki that Humbug has 
> authorised them to act on Humbug's behalf.

Yes, we are talking about the wiki, but I suspect you are confusing web
access to the wiki with "rm -r", or perhaps "mv" as James said happened
in this case.

With web access, it is impossible to remove a page.  If you do delete a
page, all that happens is a "page deleted" tag gets written (I am being
loose with my words here).  Nothing actually gets deleted, and more to
the point anyone can easily be roll back the change using the wiki's web
interface.

"rm -r", or "mv" is obviously a different thing entirely.  The data is
gone, only a SysAdmin will be able to restore it, and then in some cases
only if the backups are working.

As you say, we implicitly give people permission to do web
modifications.  But we do not implicitly give single person the right to
do an "rm -r" on the underlying wiki data structures.

This is all pretty obvious in hindsight.  It probably wasn't so obvious
when a team of people were struggling to get things working at 2AM in
the morning.  In retrospect, even just moving the data out of the way so
people would not get confused about which wiki to use was probably
reasonable.  The mistake came later - when they forgot to tell anyway
they had done it.

Now I know what happened, it all looks more like a storm in a teacup.
It didn't look like that last night, when as far as I could tell a lump
of wiki pages had just "disappeared" and the only person that could have
done that was a sysadmin.