[geeks] Mac definitions

[Michael Parson]

On Fri, 8 Jul 2011, Mike Meredith wrote:

> On Fri, 8 Jul 2011 08:02:44 -0500 (CDT), Michael Parson wrote:
>
>> My dislike of Ubuntu stems not as much from the Windowsishness of it
>
> Personally I dislike Ubuntu for _me_ because it's too inclined to make
> me do things the way they want me to do it. Fair enough for the sheep,
> but I'm too old and crusty to like that.
>
>> a co-worker needed some help getting apache to do something, don't
>> remember what it was, but after not being able to find the running
>> httpd binary, we find that the running binary is named apache.  The
>> config files aren't in /etc/httpd, they're in /etc/apache.  No where
>
> Renaming the binary is perhaps going a little further than normal, but
> frankly Apache is a poor example here. The binary should never have
> been named 'httpd' ... what if you're running different 'httpd's ?
> Yes I've done that to switch to Apache but keep CERN around for web
> caching (it was before Apache got that feature).

Yeah, maybe apache should have fixed that a long time ago, just like Ken
Thompson should have used an 'e' on the creat() call. :) Yes, one of
these is easier to fix than the other.

> And the config files were most commonly found in a directory named
> 'apache' or 'apache2'.
>
>> Aside from personal dislikes, I have a perfectly suitable business
>> justification. Most of the commercially supported software is going
>> to support being run on RHEL and maybe SuSe.
>
> That's a perfectly justifiable preference for recommending to a
> business customer. Not a reason for choosing a distribution for
> a personal server/workstation; in fact 'mixing it up' is better
> for acquiring skills - nothing is more irritating than a system
> administrator who is lost when it comes to a new Linux|Unix.

You're always going to be a bit lost when getting dumped into a new OS,
but I've been playing around with enough different unix-like OSes over
the years that I can eventually find what I need once I get a lay of
the land.  Yes, sometimes it takes you a bit longer to find things when
the vendor does stuff like put ping in /etc, or the sysv rc scripts in
/sbin, but you learn to adapt.

I'm more annoyed by people who have only ever used Linux and get that
deer in the headlights look when they are dropped on anything other than
Linux.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org
Austin, TX
KF5LGQ