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Fedora looks to increase Rawhide testingFedora looks to increase Rawhide testingPosted Mar 6, 2009 13:46 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647)Parent article: Fedora looks to increase Rawhide testing
"you need to be able to rescue your system when booting fails. I think you pretty much need to be an amateur sysadm." [mode=homer] Doh! [/mode] By very definition, people who are making decisions about what gets installed and run-permissions on their system, etc, people touching system config files, that is, not limited to editing their own preferences in /home, are administering their system, that is, they are being system administrators, aka sysadm. Part of the problem with MS in fact was that they tried to pretend this wasn't the case, that ordinary users, and more importantly, those with no INTEREST in being anything but ordinary users, could handle the responsibility of admining their systems. They tried to take shortcuts. We /know/ where /that/ got us! The Linux community has historically shied away from that, making fun of and recommending against the distribs that didn't HIGHLY encourage users to keep separate user and root accounts and configs, and to run as ordinary users most of the time. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being just a user, nor is there nothing wrong with not even WANTING the responsibility of having to decide what's secure and safe to click on and what's not, but such users need to be under the safe care and administration of real system administrators, those who tho they may be inexperienced and make mistakes once in awhile (we all start somewhere, and surely, one of the marks of a good sysadmin is that they know they can fat-finger things on occasion regardless of experience, but are prepared and can recover when they do), at least CARE about security enough to spend TIME learning what's safe to click and what's not, and when adminning for others as well as one's self, how to setup permissions appropriately to protect those who don't care and don't WANT to care, about being more than users. Now I'm reading that it's accepted that it's OK for people that aren't sysadmins to, despite the definition, "admin" systems, , as long as they are "stable"? Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot!? Like it or not, by very definition, people who admin systems are -- surprise -- sysadms! And the sooner everyone quits pretending there's a way around it and starts learning to live with it, the sooner sysadms themselves realize it and either start paying attention to stuff like backups and security and recovery-boot scenarios, or run screaming back to the relative safety of normal userdom where someone /else/ takes that responsibility and makes those decisions, the better off everyone, the entire community, the entire Internet, the entire WORLD, is. Isn't that something the Linux and larger FLOSS community has been telling the MSs of the world all along? Now it looks like we need to do a bit more telling our own, the Red Hats and Fedoras of the world, the same thing. Duncan
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