Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Also, when Van [Jacobson] says something, you can be fairly sure its right, and if it's not, then you didn't understand what Van said.

— Eric Dumazet (thanks to Dave Täht)

The thrust of the argument seems to be that by establishing good habits from the very beginning you can avoid the need for change. That may well be true, but it isn't particularly "user friendly". We should make things simple and safe so that people don't *need* to carefully form good habits.

— Neil Brown

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Quotes of the week

Posted May 25, 2012 14:37 UTC (Fri) by TRauMa (guest, #16483) [Link]

Thanks, Neil Brown, for being a voice of reason.

I have disks and sticks that only ever get exchanged between linux stations and they're formated as NTFS because it's the only sane RW file system that I can easily convince to ignore access rights. If I could, I'd even format them in a way that doesn't even record gid and the rights octets giving me smaller inodes. Yet everytime I or someone else brings this use case up on lkml the data safety ghouls emerge with their fundamental concerns. It's highly frustrating.

Quotes of the week

Posted May 31, 2012 16:13 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

Quite. But I don't think there's any point of commonality with which to start a discussion when someone says, apparently without irony:
> > My habit is, whenever I use {group,user}add commands:
> > * In advance I create a list of all current and future users (user, GID, UID)
> > common to all systems that might exchange files. The list is designed to
> > have “headroom” for future additions.
> > * I always consult this list and use options --gid $userGID --uid $userUID to
> > {group,user}add commands.
> > * Exchanging files with an unforeseen system is an exception, which requires
> > root privileges anyway,

That clearly comes from an ivory tower in orbit around a distant star.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 1, 2012 1:09 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Doesn't everyone using NFS have to do this across their NFS-using systems anyway? Not so much 'an ivory tower in orbit around a distant star' as de rigeur.

(Maintaining synch to random remote systems with which you might exchange the occasional file is excessive, though. But if you are very often exchanging files whose ownership matters, you might choose to resort to this even there.)

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 1, 2012 9:00 UTC (Fri) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

There's a reason why people use LDAP and Kerberos. I don't know of anybody who thinks that keeping a user and group database in sync is practical beyond 3 or 4 machines.

Quotes of the week

Posted Jun 1, 2012 17:45 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

True enough, though I've kept them in sync before by splitting /etc/passwd et al up into machine-local and shared ranges, then rsyncing the shared set across and catting the two together under (at the time) cfengine control. (Though LDAP works, it could be considered a cure worse than the disease. NIS, well, shudder. Hesiod, perhaps?)