* Les Bell ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
>
> In my opinion - and I realize it's just an opinion - in a world where a
> large proportion of Linux boxes are used to provide network infrastructure
> for a mixture of client platforms, issues of interoperability are
> important. If that means that a Linux admin has to know a smattering of
> Windows networking configuration, or that nslookup exists and is useful on
> most platforms, while dig doesn't, well - that's just dealing with the
> reality of what's out there on desktops.
In my opinion anyone who can pass LPIC2 (if there is not even a single
Windoze question on it) will be able to handle a Windows client better
than 80% of the MCSE's in the field today and I have reason to know.
> The correct attitude should not be one of operating system zealotry ("Test
> Linux... sink windoze!"), but of professional competence: Linux servers
> often exist to provide services to Windows clients, and that may mean
> knowing enough about the client to ensure the service is being delivered to
> the end user.
Les... you are talking to a guy that had the "pleasure" of building the
largest NT and Exchange network in the world (the US Veterans Health
Administration). Along the way (for fun) I scattered Linux boxen doing
little jobs behind the scenes in my wake. I am not an MCSE and I never
have been but I started doing Microsoft networking back in the lmhosts
days (the 80's) and came up through all the piece of shit Mickeysoft NT
Beta's and then fought my way through Microsoft Mail and the Exchange betas
and on and on and on. In 1998 working with Microsoft crap gave me what we
thought (at the time) was a heart attack. The stress of dealing with 50 field
engineers (supposed MCSE experts) a week who couldn't locate either side of
their hind quarters with both hands looking for them was a bit too much when
combined with crappy WINS architecture and gd shitty Exchange code that couldn't
scale beyond 214 servers in the GAL (Global Address List). Of those field
"engineers" we sent at least a third of them packing every week during the
two years that project lasted and they were all MCSE's. So do I have the right
to say we ought to test Linux and sink Windoze? Hell yes I do and I mean
every damn word of it. Call me a nut but this is a jihad for me. My web
site is fully anti-Microsoft and everything I do is 100% designed to
stick it in their eye! To hell with 'em and the horse they rode in on!
If Bill Gates had his way (and he might) the US government would throw
out the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution and Pennsylvania Avenue
would be renamed Mickey$oft way. We have people here in the states who
are being told by big business what they can and cannot say and write
and what they can and cannot look at and read. You can bet that none of
that came from the Linux or Open Source communities... it's coming from
the closed source vendors and developers who are trying to protect their
incomes through legal and political strategems rather than through
competition and the creation of quality. RMS has it right when he talks
about freedom and if we (the rest of us on the fringes of this community)
would quit screwing around and half stepping in our commitment to what we
believe we'd be making more progress.
Now if somebody who happens to have passed our tests also knows how to
do something with Windoze fine... but I can see no reason that we ought
to be testing them on it. This is the LINUX PROFESSIONAL INSTITUTE, not
the Mickey$oft professional institute. What we tell the world is that if
someone is an LPIC2 they can do the things we say they can on Linux! Not
Microsoft. If an employer wants someone who can do both then let 'em
hire someone who can do both, but the proof of that skill should come from
elsewhere, not from us.
> My vote says: nslookup is still a part of BIND, still a part of Linux and
> has a useful cross-platform utility that dig lacks. A competent admin
> really ought to know it.
Frankly the only cross-platform utility I know of was developed on the
Linux/OSS/free software side of the fence. Mickey$oft's crap doesn't
interoperate with anything that doesn't go out of its way on its own to
make it so. Besides what the hell do you worry about nslookup for when
you're talking about Samba? Sounds like a WINS thing-a-ma-jig to me!
NetBIOS name resolution is a far cry from DNS.
> Best,
Same.
--
csm
"...software engineers, as Percy Bysshe Shelley said of poets, are the
unacknowledged legislators of our time. acknowledge this reality and try
to shape it..." - stille/lessig
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