> > Half of the people here are talking about doing this stuff
> > on their LINUX laptops, or on their personal home directories.
> > LINUX has meant that thousands of people are now sysadmins.
>
> Bull. Just because you happen to run a Linux box or two does
> not make you a sysadmin. If that was true, I'd be a 5-star
> chef! I get *very* agitated when people make this stupid, and
> quite untrue assumption.
Actually, Toby, that's my point.
Thousands of people are sysadminning their LINUX systems.
Or should be - nobody else is (except for the hackers passing through).
But, they are not part of big organizations; they do not have
the time, effort, scratch space, test systems, backups, etc.,
to implement "proper" sysadmin procedures.
Most "good" sysadmin procedures, like the use of build procedures
Greg advocates, require quite a bit of effort to set up and maintain,
but reduce the effort to propagate a configuration change to a new
system to almost negligible. That's a good tradeoff if you are a big
site sysadmin, administering hundreds of servers and thousands of
workstations. It's much less good a tradeoff for the person who
administers only a few systems.
I know how to set up the build systems that Greg and others describe.
I have even done so for parts of my environment. But, since maintaining
the build system is not my job, and since I am always encountering new
things that should be built, I am interested in reducing the work
involved.
