> Actually, assuming you don’t know consequences of removing the fence, you also have to assume that you don’t know consequences of letting the fence in place,

> Actually, assuming you don’t know consequences of removing the fence, you also have to assume that you don’t know consequences of letting the fence in place, which might just as well turn to a dramatic situation. That assumption reads as false to me. There should generally be historical data around the costs and consequences of maintaining the fence. E.g. if you're shutting down a server, it's generally easy to figure out how much the hardware costs, how many man-hours you spend on maintaining it, etc. None of that requires knowing why the fence exists. Those costs and consequences tend to be small, because large costs have to be continually validated as a good use of resources so they have a living memory of sorts. > What is for sure, if nothing around can explain its purpose, is that it was placed here by people to negligent to induce the right clues about it. Again, I don't think this is sure. I've seen lots of cases where docs probably did exist at some point, but the writers left and successors lost the knowledge of where the docs are or failed to migrate them to a new system or etc. They're lost to attrition, not to negligence. > Remove the fence unless someone know why it was put up in the first place, and the rational still hold. It doesn't, because it's trading known risks for unknown and unbounded risks. That's usually a bad trade, especially when the known costs tend to be small. Nobody wins a promotion for causing a million dollar outage while trying to get rid of a $50/month maintenance cost.