> I'm glad this works for you. I can do that to, if I want to continue > being the handful that can support the box. I honestly recognize your > points and see the validity in them, but anything short of what I'm > asking for will continue to leave us 5 SA's as the only SA's for this > platform. My average Unix SA's around me expect to be able to use vi, > and most of them have no clue what to do without it. As for manually > doing the ifconfig, fine and dandy, as long as they can get to the man > page for it. They're use to Solaris and HP, they aren't going to know > the linux syntax and device names without a reference... which at home > in the middle of the night on-call they won't have readily.
Possible alternatives: 1) Write them a quick cookbook man page detailing the steps to get a guest back on the net -- call it zlinux-console -- and put it on one of the Solaris or HP boxes. They can log in to their favorite environment and type 'man zlinux-console', and it's all laid out for them, and that way it's always available wherever they happen to be. 2) Put all the platform specific info into a wiki or something. This is good practice regardless of the platform (cf Time Management for Sysadmins, by Tom Limoncelli) 3) deploy a 'netconfig' script on your zLinux instances that prompts for the critical parameters (ip addres, netmask, default route) and executes the appropriate stuff for them. All address the issue w/o substantial effort, and can be done in an afternoon or less. > Without that, it won't get adopted by the rest of Unixdom, at least not > here. Most of these admins have never seen a mainframe, let alone have > any idea how to deal with one. It's not just that they want to be > ignorant, there's also the cost of training them to do something > differently. They need to be able to do console work the way they > always have, simple as that. I guess I don't understand how they adapt to different kinds of systems, then. It's no different than asking someone trained as a Solaris admin to deal with a HP/UX box. At a fundamental level, it ain't the same elephant, and they shouldn't expect it to be. *Every* platform has a few weirdo things about it -- you cope and move on with fixing what needs fixed. I don't see this as whining, but I do think we're trying to solve an education problem with technology, which in the long run, just won't work. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
