[OT] Debian mailinglists [was: RE: Debian or Ubuntu?]

[Florian Diesch]

Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:

> Mario Vukelic wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 2008-05-19 at 21:43 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
>>> (particularly if it's something like SSH where a misconfiguration
>>> guarantees you're locked out of your system until you can get physical
>>> access).
>> 
>> Existing SSH connections remain up, so you can log int via SSH, edit,
>> then try to establish a new connection, and drop the old one only when
>> you are sure the new config works.
>
> Hahahahaha!  I just saw an admin upgrade 3 servers last week, without doing
> anything more than a superficial check of any of them.  It was days later
> that he actually figured out what he'd done wrong and fixed it...

A GUI tools doesn't help here. It may be able to check for syntax
errors but hardly for semantic errors.

> In the case of an SSH server, wouldn't it make more sense to use a config
> tool that actually _did_ try to establish a new connection before
> finalizing the changes?

No. You need a tools that checks if your servers are up and running and
alarms you if something is wrong. And you don't want admins who don't
do some simple checks after changing the configs.
GUI tools may be able to replace a bad admin, but not a good one.


   Florian
-- 
<http://www.florian-diesch.de/>
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