Confessions of a Unix Addict

Thursday, June 17, 2004

Munich agrees to Linux migration plan. Local government officials in Munich approved Wednesday a plan for rolling out the Linux operating system and other open source applications in more than 14,000 city administration computers. [InfoWorld: Top News]
Not bad for an InfoWorld report, not to much Redmond-centric FUD either (if you disregard the "White Papers" ad section, that is).
5:48:04 PM

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Asleep at the wheel?. IT observer Jon Oltsik says a decade's worth of corporate network defenses was set up to protect against the wrong enemy. [CNET News.com]
One hundred percent on the spot, I personally like the phrase: "...security gurus need to watch the network for anomalies." Gurus, not some poor overworked left-over from the latest outsourcing round.
5:45:06 PM

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Get me right here, I'm against copying music or movies to distribute them if the license holder doesn't permit it. I simply ignore media I can't backup for myself. I'm all for protecting my fair use rights, for that reason I'm using a Mac.
Finding this article headlined Has Jobs gone Hollywood? at JD's New Media Musings via Cinema Minima, gives me a bad feeling.
11:50:37 AM

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This goes with the Space Weather hint two days ago: Astronomy Picture of the day, found it via This is your mind on weblogs.
10:55:08 AM

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After a lengthy discussion with my brother yesterday, he's a SysAdmin too, I decided to vent a little about something that might hurt the *NIX community in the long run:
The "I know what you want, I'll do it for you and won't tell you" attitude we all came to love in WinDOS™ comes to *NIX. Be it YaST in SuSE, SAM in HP-UX, SMIT in AIX and WinDOS™ as a whole system, all of them think it is a good idea to change settings behind the back of the SysAdmin, if those settings where made the old-style *NIX way, via vi (or the the tool de jour in WinDOS™).
Is it really so hard for the aforementioned vendors to create a setting that tells the SysAdmin in the know: "There are some changes in your syslog.conf, revert to the stored settings, view changes or approve changes" with the three respective buttons? I don't want to start an X-Session just to change a setting on a box while away from the machine or on the road. If I should make a change of configuration on one of the mentioned systems, I'll have to keep notes to make sure I re-introduce the change after starting one of those little "helpers". Let alone configuration management, a SysAdmin worth its money knows how to update configurations on hundreds of systems with a script instead of doing a jogging round to every system in the network.
Sure, SysAdmins who are used to GUI config alone won't care, but I simply don't like the idea of a click that starts a chain-reaction of events messing around on my system. Kudos to SUN for letting me choose the way of introducing changes. SunScreen, the Solaris firewall can be administered by command-line or GUI, as the rest of the system. I hope this won't change in the future, just to accommodate a PHB, telling him: "You don't need people knowing what they are doing, our software allows everyone to administer a *NIX system and make it secure." These programs are supposed to help and not giving the impression that a canned routine is able to take care of everything, it simply can't. The configuration nightmare on WinDOS™ is living proof.
10:27:03 AM

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