Sorry off-list
Begin forwarded message:
From: Clark Dunson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: February 15, 2008 1:28:57 PM PST
To: Simos Xenitellis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: A bridge too far ...
Ah,
Simos thank you.
I see. Well it is worth it to us to hand in there
and get it done. Like I told Brian, I will bring
up one of the broken systems in a bit. I'll
paste the messages to this list & try what you
said.
Again everyone: apologies for being so crancccky
this morning.
On Feb 15, 2008, at 1:11 PM, Simos Xenitellis wrote:
Clark Dunson wrote:
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 ...
I think the problem is with udev (low level package), not GNOME.
Have a look at /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
You may want to empty it and restart your system. In this way, you
will be able to reclaim eth0 as the onboard network adaptor, and
so on.
Many people stumble on these enhancements, they struggle to fix,
they got them fixed and at the end they do not give back to the
community.
Make a difference,
Simos
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