Re: Those IT guys are loony

From: Arthur Corliss <acorliss@nevaeh-linux.org>
Date: Fri Mar 16 2007 - 13:36:24 AKDT

On Fri, 16 Mar 2007, Damien Hull wrote:

> Over the past few days some of the IT people on the list started jumping
> up and down, shouting and hollering. Me included. Some where pushing the
> Neva distribution others were shaking their heads at compiling everything.
>
> What does it all mean? Absolutely nothing. Your distribution of choice
> and all of the included applications will continue to work just fine.
>
> I think the debate about Neva is really about uptime. How do IT people
> provide good services and lots of up time to the end user? Most IT
> people are focused on servers, network security, IP address, subnets,
> compiling or package management etc... While these are good things to
> think about it kind of leaves the end user out of the picture. The end
> user wants to check email, surf the net, print and maybe do a mail merge
> in Word or Open Office.
>
> Ever met an IT person that can do a mail merge?
>
> The IT industry is all about customer service. IT departments should be
> providing services and support for the things the end user needs. Not
> some fancy compile this or that. I argue for end user rights. It will do
> use all some good.
>
> The above comments are from a loony it guy. ;-)

As the loon behind Nevaeh I can say definitively that you've completely lost
sight of what the real debate is. I have no interest in users, so do I want
anyone pushing it? No. Is it about uptime? No, though it incidentally has
good benefits there.

As an admin I, too, believe in user rights. I provide a service to
thousands of users across this state, and more outside of it. If I couldn't
deliver what the user wanted along with good uptime and reliability, there's
no way I could keep those users. And yet I have.

A person's distro shouldn't be the focus of debate, the debate is what skill
set an admin should have that would benefit him on *all* distros, and for
that matter, Unices. The question isn't whether you should compile
everything, the question is could you if you had to? Could you apply a
source patch to a code base to fix a vulnerable service rather than wait for
your vendor to haul your bacon out of the fire?

The question is that without an adequate understanding of how things work do
you know where the attack vectors are? Can you really claim you know the
security of your platform or are you blindly trusting some other third
party? Can you secure an insecure app if you can't find a better
alternative? An app may work fine with ten users, but does it scale under
hundreds? Thousands? Can you identify where the bottleneck is and find
ways to either a) tune the system to handle a greater load, or b) scale the
appropriate part of the architecture to handle it?

*That's* what this debate is about. And in the end, the users will benefit
from a better trained admin.

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die
---------
To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
Received on Fri Mar 16 13:36:44 2007

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Fri Mar 16 2007 - 13:36:44 AKDT