[H-GEN] CRUX (A programmers linux distro)

David Jericho davidj at tucanatech.com
Fri Aug 6 02:16:11 EDT 2004


Sandra Mansell wrote:

>On Thu, Aug 05, 2004 at 05:41:59PM +1000, Greg Black wrote:
>  
>
>>For many people, the whole point of running reliable systems is
>>that it should be easy to do fresh installs so that they can be
>>done whenever new versions come out -- there's no other way to
>>go for general purpose systems that are exposed to the Internet.
>>    
>>
>
>apt-get dist-upgrade
>  
>

But then did you run "cruft" to find items that weren't upgraded or 
shouldn't have been there and were forgotten due to slack package 
maintainers?

What Greg was getting at is that by doing a fresh install, you can be 
sure your system is baseline for that version of the OS. I'm with Greg 
here, I will reinstall any system when jumping versions. If you've laid 
out your file system right and done good change control on 
configurations, effort is fairly minimal.

> (We are using older
>hardware that no longer has a desktop use - AMD K6-2-300, 128meg ram,
>12gig hard drive.)
>

I hate PC equipment as routers. Unix environments aren't routers, just 
as you don't use a screwdriver as a chisel. You can, but it's not the 
correct use of the tool, nor is it the tool that best fits the job.

>him as well. I'd hate for things to go south when I'm not here (as they
>tend to do quite often) and him to have no idea what to do to fix it.
>  
>

This is part of the reason why I say this. What purpose does the router 
serve? To get packets from A to B and back again. Once setup. it should 
just work and continue to work regardless of what happens to it short of 
physical destruction or an unknown software bug. To have to install a 
Unix to route packets around is a lot of work, when a simple web 
interface on an appliance would have done fine.

In anycase, I'm now hungry, I'll go make myself a sandwich. Now where 
did I put my car keys? I've got to go milk the cow for some butter.

-- 
David Jericho
Senior Systems Administrator, Tucana Technologies





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