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Xref: sserve comp.os.linux.misc:30215 comp.os.386bsd.misc:4172 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!uwm.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!news.cac.psu.edu!news.pop.psu.edu!hudson.lm.com!news.galt.com!phred.ws.cc.cmu.edu!alex From: alex@pc.cc.cmu.edu (alex wetmore) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.386bsd.misc Subject: Re: LINUX SUCKS!!!! Followup-To: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.386bsd.misc Date: 21 Nov 1994 20:57:39 GMT Organization: Phred Networking Lines: 69 Message-ID: <3ar1k3$2ip@dagny.galt.com> References: <085334Z20101994@anon.penet.fi> <39lofv$q5f@ucthpx.uct.ac.za> <PSMITH.94Nov21140206@lemming.wellfleet.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: phred.ws.cc.cmu.edu X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] I fail to see wht all of this has to do with Linux or BSD, but... Paul Smith (psmith@lemming.wellfleet.com) wrote: > %% Regarding Re: LINUX SUCKS!!!!; > %% danpop@cernapo.cern.ch (Dan Pop) writes: > dp> I fail to see your point. If you don't like SMIT, there is no > dp> reason to hate AIX; simply don't use it for system > dp> administration: problem solved. If you hate SMIT, you can > dp> simply remove it from the systems you manage. > dp> A good system administrator will use SAM/SMIT for those tasks > dp> they're really good for and do the rest of the tasks in the > dp> traditional Unix way. > The problem with SMIT is you *can't* do without it and do things "in the > traditional UNIX way". Why? Because AIX doesn't do any of its UNIX > administration in the traditional UNIX way. The files you'd expect to > find lying around to control UNIX just don't exist, or don't work the > way you'd expect. Thats because the traditonal unix security files don't support some functionality that IBM wanted to add. To get this functionality they picked what seems to be the most compatible solution, which was to use the original files for what they could and put the extra information in supplementary files. > In order to do without SMIT you have to relearn a new way of > administering UNIX which is not applicable to non-AIX systems; that's > a pretty steep curve. > dp> SAM/SMIT were not designed to add 200 accounts at a time and it > dp> is extremely stupid to blame them because they can't do this job > dp> in a decent way. > But, how do you do this without SMIT then? I've *never* been able to > successfully add a user to AIX by just editing /etc/passwd. I always > end up having to delete the user(s) and readd them. Maybe this has been > fixed in AIX 4; I'm still using AIX 3.2.4. In smit there is a key (f6 i think) that tells you what command it would run to do what it is about to do. There are commands to do all of the admin stuff from the command line (which are all documented in online help that comes on the help cd-rom that info uses). Once you find these commands (which are pretty easy to find) its simple to do most system admin stuff without using SMIT at all. > Data General's DG/UX has a graphical tool "sysadm" much like SMIT and > SAM, but under the GUI it just modifies the same old UNIX config files > (well, SysV UNIX config files...) so if sysadm is too slow or klunky you > can easily do without. Not so SMIT, that's the problem I have with it. > Anyway, to bring this back around to Linux et. al., I would dearly love > to see a nice GUI administration tool for Linux; I think it would > *greatly* increase Linux's ability to compete with Micro$oft "operating > systems". > But, I hope they go with a more DG/UX-like approach: provide a front-end > to the traditional back-end, rather than changing the whole thing. SMIT is just a front end to a back end, its just that its backend is not the normal unix backend. Like I said above, they wanted functionality that the normal unix admin files couldn't support. I don't think companies should be consider the evil because they chose to extend an operating system that needed extending... alex