Darren Reed wrote: > Do you have some research to support this statement that the > sysadmin doesn't want to know about the underlying implementation? >
I've been biting my tongue for most of this discussion, but I just had to respond to this. As a former sysadmin (SunOS 4, Solaris, Ultrix, Tru64, FreeBSD, and N flavors of Linux) who migrated into driver development, I absolutely *hate* "magic". I want to know how everything works. I need to be able to read the shell scripts, and find the *text* files backing whatever datastore the system has for configuration information. I need to know what files I need to backup if a machine is unique, and what files to update with tools like cfengine in order to make more machines just like the first one. I need to be able to fix a problem in single user mode with vi from a serial console. I don't want to be surprised by the system making a temporary change permanent. Please keep people like me in mind as you try to make things easier to use for Windows / Mac users coming to Solaris. I think old farts like me who learned the ropes in the 80s and 90s comprise a large part of the Solaris installed base... Drew
