Filepro-list Digest, Vol 42, Issue 43

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2007, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>On Thu, Jul 26, 2007 at 02:36:56PM -0400, Boaz Bezborodko wrote:
>> But this will only help a little in getting more people on Linux.  Linux 
>> is just too easy to break by the average user and too difficult to just 
>> get up and running. 
>
>You wanna expand on that a bit, Bo?
>
>Cause, in my 23 years of experience, I've *never* had a user break a
>*nix machine.  Ever.  I'm only had 6 panics in that time, and 4 of them
>were bad hardware.  1 a bad driver, and I never did trace down the
>other one.

I've had user *nix machines cracked via the 'Net because of users with weak
passwords and shell accounts.  Usually they haven't managed to gain root
access, but have installed IRC servers running at user levels which can be
annoying.

>Average uptime: until we had to change some piece of hardware; usually
>every 6-9 months; I have broken a year a few times.

My best uptime was a FreeBSD 4.8 machine that hit 900 days before a 3am
power outage that didn't wake me to turn on the generator took all our
systems down when the UPS batteries drained.  Most of our systems now have
an uptime of 245 days now since that was when the power last went out.

>My last Linux install: SuSE 10.2 from DVD.  Human time: about an hour;
>machine time, about 2.5 hours.

I timed a fully automatic kickstart install of CentOS 5 yesterday at 45
minutes, of which about 2 minutes was the human time to boot from CD, and
enter ``linux ks=cdrom:/ks.cfg'' to start it.  This is a network install
from a local server here.

Autoyast installs of SuSE Linux Enterprise 10 take about the same.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal.  If you
want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative.  If you want
government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate.  If you don't want
government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist -- Joseph Sobran