Bill Moffitt's Weblog

Wednesday August 04, 2004

Comments on comments To rchrd:

Yes, paragraph breaks are a good thing. Didn't realize I had to insert the html tags by hand... now using Mozilla to edit my blog entries. Please note that I have gone back and made that huge mess readable.

To anonymous:

It seems silly to put in something that I think only 100 people can make sing (and I could be off by an order of magnitude on that estimate) but the whole reason DTrace is so cool is that the folks who can really make it sing can encapsulate that brilliance in D scripts and share them with we mere mortals on the BigAdmin DTrace forum. That's one of the reasons it's so cool!

But to your comment that we should make things a whole lot simpler, especially for the non-UNIX-initiated, all I can say is "amen, brother!"

If you're an experienced UNIX sysadmin, it's pretty straightforward to set up a Solaris machine: everything is pretty much as you expect it, and some things are delightfully easy (more so than other UNIX/Linux flavors) because we've found a lot of shortcuts.

If you're not experienced with UNIX, though, I agree that it's way too complex to get started. I make the same criticism of all the UNIXes and Linuxes, by the way. Although the big Linux distros are making some strides (YAST, etc.), I'd like to see a tool that could take someone who is not really familiar with setting up a server (an office manager or student) and step them through the whole setup without making them answer questions like, "Will you use a static IP address or use a DHCP server?"

I know the question has to be answered, but it's just a daunting question if you aren't entirely sure where an IP address comes from, what is static about it, or what DHCP stands for and why you need another server for it.

I'll rant more on this topic later...
(2004-08-04 11:14:05.0) Permalink