[H-GEN] PPP and dial-on-demand during certain hours

[James C. McPherson]

(Note reply-to: being general at humbug.org.au vs "James C. McPherson" <James.McPherson at mq.edu.au>)


Colin Riddel writes:
 > (Note reply-to: being general at humbug.org.au vs Colin Riddel <bofh at gil.com.au>)
 > Dougy wrote
 > > working acceptably in short very time, thanks to acceptable
 > > documentation
 > > and intuitive interface, however I can't say the same for any *nix I
 > > have used ..... I have been trying to come to grips with the weird
 > > commands, totally unintuitive approach to the simplest task, and the
 > > abysmally poor standard of most *nix documentation that will have to be
 > > rectified before it becomes acceptable to a wider range of users

"weird commands"? unix has a tradition of acronyms for command names: awk
(Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan - the authors), grep (Global Regular Expression
Parser), fsck (FileSystem ChecK).... emacs (let me count the acronyms...) and
of course Perl (Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister, or something). They
aren't weird at all, merely terse. Of course, it's a philosophy thing too -
don't design a tool to do more than one task (except for perl and emacs), and
make that tool do it well. As for documentation, it certainly can be terse,
but that's why there's such a plethora of Howto documents, or Sun's
Answerbooks (a _very_ useful resource, btw) for example. However, once you
know the basics, everything falls into place very easily. 

For appealing to the users, consider the target markets that Unix and NT are
aimed at. Also consider where you'll find most unix boxes these days - in the
data centre as servers, happily being connected to by NT boxen from all over
which don't know and don't need to know (much less care) what sort of machine
they are talking to. Actually, for the groups that I take care of, it wasn't a 
matter of documentation that settled us going for unix over NT - it came down
to serious capability requirements which NT did not match. Choosing an OS
purely on the quality of its documentation seems pretty stupid to me. If I had 
to use NT boxen, I'd put the time in to make sure I knew the documentation,
knew the utility programs which did the various useful tasks like configure
the ethernet and raid drivers, and make sure that I could be as proficient
with NT as I am with various unixen. Unfortunately it seems that for many
people a slick gui has taken away any semblance of needing to use one's noggin 
in adminning a system. This is not a good thing, since it gives the general
public the idea that they don't need to know a system to admin it, just how to 
point and click. My approach to adminning, which works for other people also,
is if you're going to be an admin, put the effort in to _learn_ the system
from as far inside as you can, otherwise you're just kidding yourself and
whoever is depending on you.

I admin solaris (2.5.1, 2.6 and 7), linux (2.0.34) and a handful of vaxen
running VMS. I know my machines. 


 > Interesting comment, I have 47 unix boxes and 1 nt box
 > guess which gives me more grief
 > 
 > **hint** it aint one of the 47

Colin, that wouldn't be the one which had a 42hr fsck following a power
failure now would it?!?


James C. McPherson
--
Unix Systems Administrator            Phone: +61.2.9850.9418
Office of Computing Services            Fax: +61.2.9850.7433
Macquarie University   NSW    2109     
AUSTRALIA			     

--
This is list (humbug) general handled by majordomo at lists.humbug.org.au .
Postings only from subscribed addresses of lists general or general-post.