[ILUG] UNIX conventions...

[kevin lyda]

At work we have NT machines and a small collection of UNIX boxes (AIX,
Solaris, Linux, others?).  There are only four admins, so obviously they
get pretty swamped with the NT side.  So the development UNIX boxes
get admined part time by various developers.

Amazingly this manages to work.  Rather interesting given the PR that
UNIX boxes are harder to maintain then their NT counterparts.  But that
aside, a few things have come up that I think might be of use:

Recently i patched a Solaris box.  All of a sudden /bin/sh users
complained their shells acted weird.  After some investigation I
learned:

    1. root's shell is /sbin/sh on Solaris.
    2. unlike /bin/sh, /sbin/sh is statically linked.
    3. someone had copied over /bin/sh with /usr/local/bin/bash
    4. one (or more) patches had put the standard Bourne shell
       back in /bin/sh.

A while back people had discussed /usr/local and it's place in Linux.
This is why /usr/local exists on UNIX boxes.  For the vendor controlled
files, but in Linux there are more vendor controlled files.

Why did the person replace /bin/sh?  Because there's no way for a
regular user to change their shell on a Solaris box with a "files"
passwd target.  You have to su to root and edit /etc/passwd.  Of
course you have to so to root to copy bash over sh...

In general I think Sun's maintainence of Solaris over the past five
years to be deplorable.  In that time the free software community has
pretty much built Linux from a school project to a system with at
least two competing GUI's, brought over the rich GNU tool set, brought
at least three versions of vi into the 90's (syntax hilighting,
scripting with perl, GUI?! versions, etc), came up with two CORBA
orbs for the GUI systems, numerous window managers, etc.

In terms of usability Linux slaps Solaris into groaning submission.
I don't really dislike Sun, but I don't think they've done any real
R&D on the UNIX usability side over the past five years.

kevin