On Tue, 4 May 2010, Tom Limoncelli wrote: > You know the answer or you wouldn't have been asking about it. Yes, > putting that much in %post is bad. Legacy systems aren't going to get > updates. > > A better question is, "How do I convince this other coworker that I'm right?"
No. I don't give a damn about him any more. I care about convincing management what the "best practices" are. > The answer is: You can't. Some people can't be talked into a better > solution. However, if you provide an easier solution they'll switch > to it out of laziness. Laziness is the strongest force in the > universe. Not when dealing with old time Solaris admins. They'll continue to do things the hard way just to spite the current crop of non-Solaris unix admins. It is a really annoying phenomenon. > If you set up cfengine, puppet, or any of the fine Configuration > Management systems out there, and make it easier to add to that > configuration than to add to the %post stanza, he may start using it. > If you start porting things from the %post area, one at a time, to > your system, eventually he'll get the hint. (Jedi mind trick: don't > say that you are back-porting his code. Say that you are creating the > equivalent in Puppet so that legacy machines receive the benefit too. > Eventually he may be the one to suggest removing the redundancy from > %post). I have a major issue with the number of production systems that have not received any security updates for years. So the argument that it will help older machines may not fly with him. [snip] > Once 10base-T was invented the nay-sayers claimed it was an > abomination because "it wasn't Ethernet!". It removed the "bus" > structure and turned it into a "star". "That's not ethernet! You > changed too much!" Well, nothing changed on the software side. There > was basically no barrier to entry other than buying a hub. Those > nay-sayers used it anyway because it was so much easier to install. > No more drilling and hacking to add a new connection. Whether or not > it was "real" Ethernet didn't matter because laziness is more powerful > than doctrine. Ethernet was massively inferior to token ring and arcnet from a technical standpoint. But it was a standard that the industry could agree on. Once it got turned into a star topology, it was even a technology that was practical to deploy widely. -- Matt It's not what I know that counts. It's what I can remember in time to use. _______________________________________________ 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/
