On Fri, 9 Jul 1999, Steve Lawrence wrote:
> topic with this list? Should I be subscribing to a different list, focused
> on the operation and configuration of qmail, and not on such things as
> assuming we are all programmers?
Since installing Qmail requires you to compile a whole bunch of stuff, and
then configure it afterwords, you should have at least some minimal
programming experience. Nobody says that you should be able to write
something like Qmail itself from scratch, but you should be to perform
some basic amount of debugging and analysis when things go wrong. That's
pretty much it. You should know enough programming to be able to analyze
a non-functioning system, and pinpoint, at the very least, the cause of
the failure.
But if you want a turnkey solution, that does not require any low-level
work on your part, get a packaged commercial E-mail server from a vendor.
And then you will have to depend on the vendor to analyze operational
failures and provide solutions for it.
> Myself, I am not a true programmer. I am a systems administrator. In order
That means that you can maintain and operate commercial operating systems
and prepackaged software.
But when you go to the point of using software that comes in form of
source code, you should have programming experience. If you don't, try to
find a vendor that sells a commercial, precompiled and preconfigured,
version of your software.
> to configure programs for use on my servers (currently managing 4 unix, 1
> mac, 1 NT) I am forced to delve into source code. That gets pretty time
> consuming, and really, I wish there was a better way!
Not if you want to use free, commodity, software.
> I think expecting
> administrators to be programmers too is expecting too much.... but then
When you have to administer commercial, prepackaged, software, it is too
much, because you do not have the access to the source code, and you have
no need for any programming or debugging skills. If something goes
blooey, you have to whine to the vendor.
But when you use open source software, that usually comes in source code
form, that's a completely different matter.
> again, the program is free and it works well when set up properly, so I am
> not complaining, by any means! I appreciate having access to this software,
> very much!
>
> > Are we talking about unix sys admins here? The entire unix
> > environment is a programming environment. The shell, the standard
> > utilites. What experienced unix sys admin hasn't programmed?
>
> I have been managing Unix servers for 3 years, and I don't program C. Does
> this mean I am not experienced?
It means that you are experienced with running and maintainining
prepackaged, preconfigured, commercial software. You are not experienced
in building new software systems from scratch, using widely available
source code and tools.
Because of the unquestionably higher value of free, commodity,
peer-reviewed software, you should expect to deal with it in increasing
frequency, and that means you should get at least some amount of
appropriate experience.
