🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <davidc-0108951844310001@mac30.arts.uwa.edu.au>,
David Cake <davidc@cs.uwa.edu.au> wrote:
>
>>] Every week that I spend having to tune my Unix box, is a week
>>] of real work lost.
>>
>>You wouldn't need to tune it if you had left it tuned in the
>>first place, or were trying to use it beyond the scope of the
>>tuned configuration from the install.
>
>   Which exactly illustrates the problem with Unix. Most of the vaunted
>power and configuarability is available only to people with a very large
>amount of time and knowledge (usually someone that does nothing but Unix
>system adminstrate).

   A large amount of knowledge, yes, but you need that to be competent in
anything (I've worked with VMS off-and-on for about a decade now, and my
system administration skills for it are about as good as my admin skills
for MacOS).  But a large amount of time?  No; if I exclude the time I
spend rewriting system utilities to make them friendlier, I spend _maybe_
15 minutes a day administering the pell.com domain (4 machines scattered
around California; one serving news and mail, one offsite at work, one
workstation also used for games, and another offsite so I can dial in to
work) and the bulk of that work is doing usenet news administration
(cleaning up news batches, deciding what newgroup and rmgroup messages
to honor, and all the other trivial junk that you'd get no matter what
system you run news on.)


>Which makes it a very expensive solution. A Mac might
>not be as powerful as a Unix box, but you can do all the system
>administration for a dozen Macs (including system updates, retuning,
>networking... the whole lot) in well and truly less than an afternoon a
>week. And that is presuming that your users are often installing new
>stuff. But a Unix system with a dozen excitable users (that keep wanting
>new stuff all the time) will keep a sys admin run of their feet. 

   No it won't.  If the users want new stuff, they can bloody well
install it themselves -- I keep a fairly tight control on what gets
stuffed into /usr{/*}/bin on my machines.

>   But a very small amount of computer knowledge would allow you to fix
>the Mac quite quickly, in most cases (reinstall the system, Zap the PRAM,
>rebuild the desktop (not in that order) and your generally looking fine).

    Gahh.  I've done that.  Wasted 5 hours one afternoon before I
could get the silly machine not to give me the frowny mac icon. On
the other hand, last time I scragged one of my unix machines {I was
playing around with a new kernel and got one that didn't boot,
misdiagnosed the problem and reloaded from distribution floppies}
it took about a hour to build install floppies from scratch (MCC
1.0+; an _excellent_ linux distribution), rebuild the disk, reload
the system software, and slurp the bulk of the system off the
network.

    Of course I've got a lot more experience administering unix
than I do MacOS -- I'm sure that I could do Mac reinstalls that
quickly now that I've done it a few times and, more importantly,
have a unix machine that can act as a fileserver for the interesting
local binaries I'd like to run.

                 ____
   david parsons \bi/ orc@pell.com
                  \/