[ILUG-Social] Re: [ILUG] Mother and Father.

[Kathryn Cassidy]

If this thread is going to continue then please let it be on  social.

Brian, Colm didn't insult you in his original response, you started 
the insults, so you really can't expect others not to flame you now.  
This mail, however, is not a flame.

One of the issues you don't seem to understand is that there is a big
difference between installing and maintaining a system.  That's not
meant to be an insult (you are afterall a developer not a sysadmin, so
why should you be insulted if someone suggests you don't know something
about sysadmining, right?).

What people have been trying to point out to you is that while it's a 
great idea to muck about in the internals of a system, that system
should not be a production machine.  If you're getting to a stage
where you are overwriting important files when performing installs
you should really look at reininstalling the machine and using a
package manager to look after keeping thigs up to date.  That's what
a good sysadmin would do.  Note that a good sysadmin would already
be confident in his/her linux knowledge and therefore wouldn't feel
any need to prove how much of a nerd they are by doing everything
by hand.  Any sysadmin who's maintained a number of machines over any
decent period of time will learn that things that make their job easier
are actually good, even if they may seem like the wimpy way of doing 
things.

Next, modifying inf files is certainly a useful skill to have, 
it's fixed problems for me in the past, but I wouldn't
hold it up as an example of my great ability or anything.  I'd 
consider it to be a fairly minor accomplishment.  Same goes for
working in Gateway.  As Kate has pointed out, not all of us 
ex-employees have such a high opinion of the staff there as you
seem to.  However, really this isn't relevent, nobody's questioning
whether you have written programs or installed drivers.  Nobody
doubts that modifying files has worked for you in the past.  Many of
us don't doubt this because we have done the same in the past.

Nobody was saying that you didn't have the ability to do things manually
we were just pointing out that if you want to maintain a production
system you should probably not try to do everything by hand as
it'll lead to a nightmare of a system later on.  Just because
one can do everything manually doesn't necessarily mean that one
should.

Finally, I beleive that you are alone in thinking Colm should 
implement hard and fast rules about how people should quote their
emails.  I'd wager that everyone else on the list is quite happy
with the guidelines and gentle nudging system that we use at the
moment.  If it were to be shown that the majority agreed with you
then maybe it would change, but until then, it's probably wise
to follow the suggestions made to you by the list maintainer.

Thanks,
Kathryn.