On Sun, 5 May 2002, Ronald W. Heiby wrote:
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>
> Sunday, May 5, 2002, 7:39:51 AM, Jean wrote:
> > But now you find that the macho Unixers will win that their little
> > brains are unable to decypzer the scripts who configure the network
> > in RedHat or Mandrake and that is why they want a bare bones distro.
>
> I used UNIX and administered UNIX systems for many years. I hope you
> will not interpret this message as a win (whine?).
>
Same here. This is rather long, sorry about that.
> I think that it is really cool, spiffy, neato that RH 7.2 installs and
> pretty much just works. For the last three installs of 7.2 I did, I
> *needed* to make only a couple of little tweaks to get basic
> functionality going. This is a good thing.
>
I strongly agree :)
Poor installation and administration utilities are waste
of admin/company/BOFH resources nowadays. I've heard similar
macho bullshit Jean was referring and some seem to think
holding back some people being able to run/admin unices would
make better job security for admins and consultants, that's crap!
Those guys really
a) don't understand that larger user base will make more job
opportunities, good admins are needed always when you have
enough sites using the system.
b) companies and other organizations can't afford investing
long term in technology that is difficult to administer and
only in hands of few
c) haven't been around long enough consulting and admin business
that have already figured that how boring it is to fix things
over and over again that should have been job of the distribution
maker or vendor out of the box.... or haven't at least met any
consultant that would not consider that more suitable for
a chimp than ecudated human being
Thus, if some few does still want to learn from unix or linux
ground up he should have no problems finding the source and start
building his own system from ground up.
It's fun for most part of the first year I remember, then IMHO
if one don't yet come out something significant how to improve
existing distributions it's best for each one time to format the
hard drives, install some advanced distro and move on to new
challenges, if he/she would really like to be in business ...
The business isn't looking BOFH's to maintain their systems,
what they do look instead are for one with skills to use vendor
provided tools (to secure the configuration files are preserved
when upgrading), discipline in change control and keeping the
design, configuration- and OAM documentation up to date.
> However, recent Windows incarnations do the same thing, as do
> Macintosh. What's the difference?
>
Well IMHO there's a lot of difference with modern unices and
decent linux distro compared to mac and windows installation
and management.
Try getting a proper list of what has been installed from
any wintendo or mac and tell me which file came from which
package, what should be the ownerships, access permissions,
checksum and that noone had tampered those. (Haven't checked
MacOS X status though on this, anyone knows is there decent
package management implemented?)
At least now windows and MacOS < X installation tools do look
pretty but the package management just really isn't much help
after installation if you would like anything beyond add, modify
remove.
That is the very reason why common way of fixing windoze and mac
is by reinstalling it, right. There are no tools available in the
distribution that would enable you to spot where the problem
is and just repair-install that single package without taking
the system off-line.
For me, missing these tools reveals the poor quality of the
systems and lack of design as without these kind of vendor
provided tools many operating in datacenter class systems are
pretty much out of luck being able to boot or get scheduled
downtime at will.
MacOS is very easy to install, but it hasn't been previously
really nothing much as a personal desktop operating system,
but that is changing with MacOS X which is more complicated
than Mac has before. Darwin the partially FreeBSD based system
is good platform to start with, provided the right tools are
available.
> Well, as I see it, the difference is that with UNIX / Linux, I have
> the power and ability to go in and manipulate the configuration to fix
> things when it doesn't "just work".
>
Agreed, fixing just the portion that is broken.
Windoze is a blackbox that either works if you are lucky or
not if you aren't. It doesn't provide much helpful tools that
would help pinpointing what is broken. I got just another
day problems with McAfee virus shield with w2k. The virus
shield just stopped working and won't restart. I tried removal,
reinstall -- no luck. Tried removing and cleaned and inspected
that there are no leftover files or registry entries, then
reinstall -- won't work still.
DrWatson log is only that I get, there is some problem with
loading one DLL and system call backtrace and hex dump that
won't tell me much. Within few days we know if McAfee support
will be able to figure out or wether the reinstall of the whole
OS is necessary.
The windows registry has some good points (configuration
depostit centralized remote admin can connect), but
otherwise it's a big mess. Why would you think the one of the
most popular downloaded third party utility is a registry
cleaner?
There is no need to go futher details, but reimplementing
registry with a real directory structure and files on disk
would make fullblown ACL:s avalaible, backing up and replicating
to another location would be lot easier.
First creating new index registy-tree which a privileged admin
user only with available system program could be used to
add a directory branch for each application installed and
underneath wich would be required to have a subtrees or
symlink kind linking feature would be used to refer any
real location at the registry the application registry entry
would try to write/modify.
Any application that would try to write anywhere in registry
and would not do it via that index registry would be killed by
segmentation violation no questions asked.
That would effectively implement cure for the problems windoze
now has that you install a softare as an adming privileges and
then when ordinary user tries running it the application does not
have enough privileges to registry ... even the administrator
would not be able to run programs without following the rules
and software vendors would not come out with software that does
not handle registry properly, require to write restricted registy
locations that ordinary users should not be allowed.
Forcing all applications to write registry via known narrow point
for that application would make it easy to spot where application
requires read/write access. Now you are out of luck if the application
does not verbosely tell you what failed, and usually it doesn't.
Also it would be very easy to implement a system that would
clean up registry after deinstallation of the application,
you could find all needed information from one single point.
> I remember trying to install a modem on my brother-in-law's Mac. I
> spent a couple of hours on it and gave up. Nowhere was it documented
> where the file was that held the AT command to initialize or dial the
> modem. Nowhere was it documented how to go in and edit the file if you
> were able to find it. I couldn't even find a "text editor", just a
> "word processor".
>
I use MacOS quite often editing graphics and doing
NLE on videos. As to your question the answer depends
certainly a bit what MacOS your brother-in-law has,
but IMHO generally mac is supprisinly easy, just takes
some time to get acquaint with the logic if you come
from PC with a windows.
> Windows is somewhat better on that score, but still tries to be overly
> "friendly" and hide such stuff from the user.
>
Many coming from mac or unix background do not find
windows that easy, but I do agree that windows tries
to hide information that it's designers thought would
only annoy common people... well, but corporate practises
often force many advanced people to use it too and it's
big underestimation from microsoft to ignore advanced
users and needs.
Ok, just to show what I mean, this is a true story happened
to me year and half back. I was looking a way to use windows
explorer "find utility" and trying to get a list of all word
*.doc files I had on certain drive. Three was 100+ of those
and fine I got a list of them in front of me. I wanted to have
a list copied to clipboard and tried to select all the files
with details of sizes and modification dates etc. to be added
as an Appendix to an technical documentation I was writing then.
Right you can't select anything but the first column ie. the
file names. You can try it yourself, if you select all the
file names and try to paste it to notepad, but you can't.
Then tried adding it to word... it will try to add all selected
files to your word document :-o, but most amazed about the
bold sillyness was still to come, try printing the list
and some *cken idiot has decided that it will think...
"hmm, you have these 100+ files here and they are word files,
let's open 100+ instances of word and let those print all
of these files." :-o
I actually pressed the print and after finding what I had done,
ie. when about dozen word instanced had suddenly popped to my
face I realized what is happening. The system was completely
hosed about it, nothing worked but power-off...
I've never in my life even been capable of thinking something
would be coded so perverted!
I did get the list, but making a share and mounting it from
Linux.
> I would hate to see the packaged distros go so far towards the Windows
> and Mac camps that the only way to configure things was through their
> "friendly" configuration program. I *really* want to see the flat
> files documented, even it it is back in an Appendix or in a file
> somewhere (whose location is clearly documented). That way, when I
> want to do something that those implementing the configuration program
> didn't think of (and I *will*), I have the information I need to do
> what needs to be done.
>
Enterprise or even department wide configurations and policies
forcing is bit hard with the oldfashioned system you long for,
but good centralized configuration system does not need to be
binary mess like microsoft registry. See my critics about registry
above. Text files, like XML, should be just fine with CPU speeds we
have today.
> I'm all for letting things just work, but I also want the
> documentation that allows me to make unanticipated things work
> (without having to read the source).
>
Agreed.
:-) riku
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