Re: At last, the big zamboni hits the playing field

[David Wolfskill <david@catwhisker.org>]

>Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2001 15:41:25 -0500
>From: "K. M. Peterson" <KMP@WI.MIT.EDU>

>And that's the environment that this is meant for.  A fundamental thing that
>we Unix SysAdmins take for granted is that we set up a box and don't give out
>the root password and thus prevent people from erasing configuration files.

That depends a great deal on the environment in question (which is
something you also point out about the ZA stuff).

For example, in my current position, I am the UNIX sysadmin for the
engineers -- predominantly, software developers who use FreeBSD as the
base for the product they're working on, as well as using it for their
desktops.  So they're re-building everything from scratch (in their
"build environments") -- not just the kernel, but all of user-land, too.

Sure, we use things like chroot to limit the damage when something goes
wrong, but my colleagues all have root access to their boxen (via sudo).
And sometimes we swap disks in & out, or add or remove additional NICs,
make private nets hanging off the back end of desktops (my own desktop
is a case in point; that way, I have a reasonably private environment
for loading new machines), for example.

Granted, this doesn't extend to the internal servers or to those that
live on my employer's perimeter net -- ref. the comment about the
environment.

(As a further illustration, when I received the laptop I currently use
at work, I didn't stop to even pay attention to whatever might have been
installed on the disk, since I knew it wouldn't have been FreeBSD
4.1.1-S.  I powered off the old laptop, pulled the drive out, swapped it
into the new laptop, booted single-user, re-configured XFree86,
re-booted multi-user, and proceeded from there.  (Later, I got FreeBSD
installed on the new laptop's disk, and swapped the drives back again.)
And when one of my colleagues was having difficulty figuring out a
routing issue, I plugged 2 PCMCIA NICs into my laptop, and turned it
into a NAT/router....)

I suppose there are some who would consider administration in an
environment where that sort of thing is tolerated (let alone encouraged)
to be a nightmare... I think it's interesting and educational; besides,
we get to contribute back to the Open Source community, which is Cool.

Cheers,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david@catwhisker.org
As a computing professional, I believe it would be unethical for me to
advise, recommend, or support the use (save possibly for personal
amusement) of any product that is or depends on any Microsoft product.