apache 1.3.26?

[Graham Leggett]

Christopher Murtagh wrote:

>  This is fine for a trivial setup. When you run an enterprise system that
> has to communicate/interact with different departments/groups,
> documentation is necessary. We have learned this the hard way, and now
> everything that is done is documented and it makes life much easier.

This is fine for policies, etc, but for setups the documentation needs 
to be included with the setup itself, otherwise it always gets lost. 
I've found CVS is a valuable tool for setups, if only to keep track of 
how things have changed over time, and when.

>  If you are having problems making mistakes often, then perhaps your
> documentation and/or script writing needs some work.

Nope, it's just me. Humans make mistakes, and no amount of documentation 
will prevent that. I pay the most attention to "what if"'s and recovery 
senarios - they have proved invaluable in the past.

More importantly setups need to be consistent: I have encountered 
frequent situations where people deployed websites under unlabelled IP 
address based sites and then complained when they were moved. If you 
have a setup, it should be clear what's going on.

> I have more problems
> sorting out RPM dependencies than I ever had compiling from source.
> Recently, I had to update OpenSSH on a RedHat box that I didn't setup, and
> tried via RPMs, but got stuck in a circular dependency and a glibc version
> problem. The simple solution, grab source, compile and voila.

Mix RPMs from different vendors, and you will have problems.

>  My point was that these geeks have been working in large system
> environments for decades and have amassed a lot of experience. These folks
> often don't take kindly to RPMs.

"Ten years experience" often means "doing the same thing every year for 
ten years". I don't want to hear from someone it's done that way 
"because we've always done it", I want to hear it's done that way 
because "we have learned from experience that these are the pitfalls".

If someone says that RPMs are bad, I want to hear a good reason for 
that. "I don't take kindly to them" is not an acceptable reason.

>  Lovely in theory, essential in practice. Programmers/geeks/sysadmins who
> don't keep track/document of what they do, especially on a custom system
> that several people work on, should be fired.

There are many things that "should" be done, but at the end of the day 
there is absolutely no reason to make people's lives difficult. Keeping 
separate documentation is time consuming and annoying. Keeping 
integrated documentation (inline comments, javadocs, etc) does the same 
job and makes people's lives easier.

Regards,
Graham
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