Friendly Gnomers;
Recently we came up against some decisions made by your team that
have left us quite irate and disillusoned. In particular, your
choice to go around the design of Unix with regards to hostname/
network and other permissions, e.g.:
Users and Groups
Time and Date
Shared Folders
Services
The hostname is usually set by the ‘hostname’ program, but not in the
Gnome case. We cannot set the hostname and recover several of our
systems due to your design choice, which by every standard is not
Unix-like.
Consider what’s happened. We cloned a drive and booted it on another
machine. Oops, we forgot to shutdown the original system before we
turned on the clone. Our DHCP server refused to give an IP address
to the same hostname twice. Of course. That’s called ‘security’.
Result? The cloned system failed the network. That’s all good. On
a normal Unix box, we could just use the command ‘hostname newname’
to change the hostname, and then reboot. But not on a Gnome
machine. The ‘real’ hostname is kept and set by Gnome?!?
Booooooooooo!!!
Gnome (Ubuntu 7.0.4) now blocks us PERMANENTLY from changing the
hostname. And Gnome overrides su/root?!? Whathehellis this dialog
box?!?:
"You are not allowed to access the system configuration"
That is really bogus. I'm root!!! Keep doing stuff like this and
you might as well just hand the future to Windows Vista. Now a bunch
of our clones, and all of the hours we put into them are DEAD!!! We
have tried every workaround we found on the internet: restart dbus,
use alacarte, blah, blah, blah. None work. If we shut the original
machine down first, boot a clone for the first time, and then change
its hostname by hand with your GUI, then reboot, we can save that
clone aka, workaround. But this blocks up our builds and slows us
down a lot. Perhaps you could tell us how to access the hostname
within Gnome directly so we could set it as part of the cloning
process before booting the first time? We guess that your security
policy will not allow us to find out how to do this, right?
Our Admin is winning the day with management by saying we should be
on Windows Embedded. The way things are going now, he may win. Our
only out? Spend the next two weeks re-cloning, hit our delivery
schedule, and eat the $$$$ - or scotch Gnome.
The -backend- scripts *.pl are not happy, and you have just
unravelled three decades of Unix wisdom. How dare you create state
inside of Gnome that overrides Unix, that not even ‘su’ can fix?!
Man that is weird. All of us other programmers are forced to deal
with permissions, why not you? The developers of X have lived with
the rules despite having a much harder problem to solve. What are
you dong??
Sorry to sound abusive, but I know of no other way to impress upon
you how serious this situation is, and what risk you have introduced
to the entire Linux community via your design choice. Until we hear
of a work around or a fix, we are proposing to cut all of our
machines back to runlevel three. (If it can even be done in
Ubuntu). We have no other way of knowing what other similar
decisions your team has made, and a damn strong customer who is in no
mood for this kind of BS.
I’m sure, given my quasi-hostile tone, that you are turned off, but
any insight or guidance you could offer would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you ...
Marco Buscaglia
(watch the film)
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