Agreed. One sysadmin managing a score of mission-critical servers and a half dozen projects does not allow much time for one-offs and special cases. Over my 25 years of sysadmin experience, I've learned that the most efficient thing I can do as a sysadmin is to allow the package management system to do much of my work for me.
There are legacy systems I inherited with their spaghetti installations of all special-case software and manual hack builds and their touchy interdependencies that I am still afraid to do much more than basic security updates of the OS. Wes On 11/5/2010 5:11 AM, Vick Khera wrote: > On Nov 5, 2010, at 5:26 AM, Robert Grasso wrote: > >> This is my own opinion : as you increase your Unix/Linux/RedHat skills, you >> will feel less concerned by such issues. > As you increase the number of systems you need to manage, you will feel more > concerned by such issues. > > A good package manager to manage all of your software is essential to > configuration management on a large scale. We even go so far as to make > internal packages of our own software to deploy to the servers -- nothing is > manually done, except for the one-off office server which does the file/mail > serving. > > As you note later in your message, you have to manually go in and fix up > things when you upgrade other parts of your system. This is the job of your > package manager. It does not scale to do this by hand.
