Fwd: The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

[Avi Alkalay]

On 3/28/06, Toshio Kuratomi <toshio at tiki-lounge.com> wrote:
> I'd argue that as the number of subnets and special case workstations
> goes up, the ability of a system administrator to read and understand
> the flat file is going to be markedly harder than for the admin to read
> the custom-crafted dhcp-config syntax.
>
> So if the end-goal is to keep the system-administrator's poor brain from
> exploding while manually editing the files, I'd say custom-crafted
> config files can be a win versus the generic one-size-fits-all approach.



Thats not the end-goal.

See, the end goal is to standarize configurations in such a way that
one program with proper permissions can directly interact with another
program's configurations. So in your DHCP server problem, an LDAP
helper can easily change DHCP's configuration to add/remove/change
some host's fixed IP address, for example, without having to ask the
sysadmin (a human being) to edit it manualy, and without having to
regenerate the entire config file again.

Another more easy to understand problem that a global standarized
configuration standard solves is the ability for you to buy a
commodity video card, install it on your system, and the vendor
scripts will safely, automatically, and precisely change your X.org
standarized configuration to inject itself there. Currently they have
to ask you to use vi plus your human brain and human eyes to make the
xorg.conf changes by yourself, because it is too hard for them write
an xorg.conf "compiler". Actualy, we know that what really happens is
a simple "Linux is not suported" statement from these vendors.

Avi