From: Brian O'Donoghue (Brian.ODonoghue at domain kbs.ie)
Date: Tue 09 Jul 2002 - 14:04:26 IST
[Thank god this is my lunchbreak]
[Most likely they don't. Possibly not for the reasons you suspect,
however.
Let's take it slow, for the hard-of-thinking.]
Whatever.
[And I'm a Sneiro Ssytme Amdinitsrtora of sorts. For the record, I
have thirteen years experience with Unix systems administration;
perhaps more than most, but a lot less than some. Your argument seems
to be something like "I don't know what I'm doing, and it's not my
main job anyway, therefore it must be better than your way." Can you
spot the flaw here?]
Yeah here's the flaw... when you were sysadmining I was nine years old.. hey
good for you , but guess what I used to be a Gateway Tech... a good one..
and contrary to popular belief we didn't get paid for nothing.... and I
would like to think that if I'm capable of adding a device string to an inf
file off my own bat and getting a winmodem working that I have at least the
cursory requisite skills to make a system from the ground up.
You know at a certain level it's all just hardware and drivers... so when
you have installed tens of thousands of drivers.. as I had in my role as a
Gateway tech.. you get a feel for drivers and hardware and os configuration
that most people plopping into IT who consider themselves hot stuff just
seem to lack... but perhaps I'm being too harsh on people without as much
experience as my self in setting up os and troubleshooting hardware and
driver issues.. plus I don't really see how this fact pertains nor equates
with your assertion that I'm incompetent, so no sorry I have a significant
divergence of opinion with you on this one.
[Your email client does allow you to edit the messages you send,
though, right? All that's required is that some *easy to see*
distinction be made between the text you're writing and the text
you're quoting. Everyone else seems to manage it, even those
unfortunate enough to be stuck with Outlook Express. You can see
above that the lines beginning with "> " are written by you, and the
other lines are written by me, right? This allows a conversational
style to develop which allows other readers to clearly see who said
what. It's not a pedantic egomaniacal constraint; it's merely a
courtesy to list readers.]
Sorry... make a clear an unambiguous rule that people can read to and
evaluate 'BEFORE' signing up to the ILUG, instead of awaiting what you
consider infraction to make some sort of self ingratiating point.
Either make a rule or don't, but don't half make a rule, because that's
ambiguous and pointless, don't get me wrong the list is great, but if you're
gonna have a rule, then have a rule... don't have a half rule...
Posting stuff like 'just change your damned mail' seems at best coercive to
me perhaps a link like this would seek to illucidate people on this.
http://www.fortunecity.com/campus/spanish/82/fags.gif
Perhaps not.
My problem... isn't with the... occasional necessity for...
once-off modifications like you... describe, it's... with the end
result of many... such modifications. As I've... explained already,
such a sequence of modifications... leaves you with an
unmaintainable... system. It's perhaps not... *so* bad on a single
system, but it sure... doesn't scale well.
The system runs quite well actually... apart from the former owner of it
having put a UDMA hard disk onto a chipset that does not support UDMA...
thus giving a nasty error on boot... plus if I want to remove hand compiled
stuff what the hell is wrong with
make uninstall?
[Can you see... indcidentally... how overuse of ellipsis makes your...
writing very disjoint and gives... the distinct impression of lack
of... mental organisation?]
No offence but, you see how power corrupts and absolute power corrupts
absolutely... hey colm.. do you honestly think that I need to listen to this
from you? Come on down off of your mailing list perch and join us in the
real world.
[Absolutely. But there's a difference between tinkering with your own
system to learn how everything works, and with jeopardising the
stability of production, mission-critical systems in the name of
"freedom".]
Did I miss a meeting? I said the reason we haven't changed over from
exchange is that the byrnari thingy wouldn't start properly... and a cursory
review of my mails will show how I am unwilling to make changes to the
system that I don't think I can get configured in time... this is one of my
problems with rpm like distros... it just bangs the binaries in there if you
tell it to do so... no in reality that really is a risk if your system is
mission critical.
[I *said* this in my first email on the subject - my first
Linux was Slackware too, and it's an excellent system for learning
lots of things from first principles; but it's *seriously* unsuitable
for a production system. ]
But in reality systems with all the bells and whistles of distrobutions like
Red Hat are needlessly bloated... for example using Mandrake a Red hat clone
for example... it runs various hardware detection tools on boot... now
honestly any techie worth his salt already knows what hardware he has and
doesn't need a kludge app to go detecting his hardware... so any competent
techie can edit a .conf file and load his modules... what I don't need is
some distrobution trying to hold my hand and find hardware I am perfectly
capable of telling it it has... I mean come on
[I settled on Debian
after many evaluations of different strategies; Debian allows me to
keep 20 boxes all patched and synchronised, while maintaining and
propagating customised changes, all for less than an hour a day. I
strongly doubt that your system would scale beyond a single box.]
Pot kettle... come on colm Debian the last time I used it was the thick end
of slackware.. it wouldn't exactly have a miasma of gui tools with bells and
whistles to do the handholding... in fact I would put
[Debian,Gentoo,Slackware,FreeBSD & Friends] in much the same category... to
me this all sounds like a debian rant.. in which case you are partly right
and partly wrong.. Debian is good too, but is so similar to Slackware (or at
least the 2.2_r2 version I use is) that your entire argument about Slackware
being a non-mission critical appropiate system seems like the biggest troll
I have encountered in days.
<I'm off to have lunch now... will rant with y'all later>
Bob
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