Filepro-list Digest, Vol 42, Issue 48

[Fairlight]

Only Boaz Bezborodko would say something like:
> 
> What I learned in the process is that the learning curve on Samba was 
> steep enough that I probably would have been better off moving FP to 

I don't recall samba as having a steep learning curve.  man smb.conf
I've been through older versions (2.x) and newer (3.x) and had to migrate
between the two.  It's never taken more than a couple hours to figure out
what was wrong.

The biggest issue was SuSE 10.1 having some issue whereby the registry got
corrupted, and I wasn't aware they'd added one until I started digging.
Remind me again why samba needs its own registry files?  Anyway, I think
the user corrupted it in that case, although I can't prove it one way or
another.  It could have shipped bad, it could have been
misconfiguration--they screwed up enough else even using yast that it took
longer to undo their damage than to do it properly from scratch.

Which just goes to show you, having an admin tool isn't everything, you
actually have to know what data you're putting into it.  And this was a
person that keeps touting scoadmin as easy.  YaST makes far more achievable
easily, but it's that "far more" that's at issue.  For instance, the
user complains sendmail and apache are hard to configure on linux.  They
can't configure it properly on SCO either, but they blame the OS anyway,
nevermind that more tools are provided to do it at a basic level that they
still can't get right due to lack of understanding of the basic subsystem.
That annoys the hell out of me.

What people -want- are psychic admin tools that do what they want, not what
they tell it to do.  Anything less, and you get, "This OS is horrible
compared to [insert their favourite OS]."  Sorry folks, it's not the OS,
it's a lack of fundamental low-level knowledge.  Given that knowledge, you
can do it at the raw level on any system without admin tools of -any- sort.

And people complain that I come across as elitist when saying people in
general should know what they're doing or have time to learn.  The truth
is, -they're- the ones damaging their systems via ignorance.  It's a valid
point they just don't want to hear because they've been indoctrinated into
the, "All OSes should be PnP," school of thought.  I'm sorry, but after the
hardware detection and driver loading is done, *nix should not be PnP in my
opinion.  It's too powerful a tool to give to the ignorant.  It's like
giving a .50cal machine gun to a 5yr-old, or letting kids drive at age 10.

Okay, you may have touched a sore point, there. :) Nothing personal...more
wrapped up in what I've seen in the past.  But citing the whole learning
curve thing just sets it off.  The learning curve isn't that steep, and
with power comes complexity anyway (usually), so it's actually ahead of the
game.  I see no grounds for complaints unless something is made -so- overly
complex that it's ludicrous.  Best example of needlessly complex that comes
to mind is the sudoers file syntax.  THAT is needlessly complex, although
pretty powerful.

mark->