[ On Wednesday, August 9, 2000 at 17:58:57 (-0700), Glew, Andy wrote: ]
> Subject: RE: CVS'ing home directory files; CVS in place
>
> 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.
And that's exactly why I said "Personal Computing" is a nightmare for
security professionals. I should have extended it to cover *all*
computing professionals! ;-)
> 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.
There are indeed many issues that could likely be addressed to make it
easier, safer, and more reliable for non-computing types to "manage"
their personal systems. However I don't think better build systems, or
even versioning filesystems, are going to be anything more than a tiny
and mostly hidden facet of the solution.
--
Greg A. Woods
+1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Secrets of the Weird <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
