On Mon, 2010-03-22 at 10:05 -0400, Patrick Cable wrote: > On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 9:45 AM, Adam Tauno Williams > <[email protected]> wrote: > > 3.) DO NOT BASTARDIZE YOU SYSTEM STARTUP SCRIPTS. You will eventually > > get hit by a bus or get a different job. If you hack your system's > > standard scripts - like mounting /tmp without an fsck or recreating tmp > > at book - you will break something, or something will break eventually. > > And the guy who has to fix it will have to figure out whatever his > > misguided predecessor did to ruin the system. NEVER BASTARDIZE YOUR > > SYSTEMS STARTUP SCRIPTS. JUST DON'T. EVER. Fix the issue correctly: > > by provisioning an application specific scratch area and/or using tmpfs. > What if you document your processes? Wouldn't that mitigate that... issue?
I don't believe so; a sys-admin is entirely correct to make reasonable assumptions about a system. There is just no good reason to do this - when legitimate and customary mechanisms exist to accomplish the exact same thing. Especially with startup scripts - where messing with them will invariably mean that someday a server is rebooted - and does not boot correctly, very likely resulting a service outage. If I'm going to modify the DNS config, the user authentication, etc... of a server I fully expect to look at any documentation first - because of course those things are customized. But to install routine updates, reboot, etc.... these shouldn't require special knowledge - if they do something is just wrong. If they do then someone, including the original sys-admin, will eventually forget and screw up. Routine things should always be routine; and special is not routine. Maybe that can't be accomplished in every case; but it should always be a primary goal of a professional systems administrator - to make your systems conform to norms and thus be as easy as possible to understand. -- Adam Tauno Williams <[email protected]> LPIC-1, Novell CLA <http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com> OpenGroupware, Cyrus IMAPd, Postfix, OpenLDAP, Samba _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
