Problems with sudo

Kevin D. Clark kevin_d_clark-Wuw85uim5zDR7s880joybQ at public.gmane.org
Mon Nov 30 15:25:23 EST 2009


Dan Ritter writes:

> Ah. It's a much cleaner demarcation over here: a desktop or laptop or such
> is a machine that sits on your desk and has a nice screen or two and is
> set up the way you want it. You do your email and your IM and your word
> processing and expense reports and so forth on it. It doesn't matter if
> it's a Mac or a tutti-frutti Linux box or what have you. We don't back it
> up, and we expect that the worst that happens if the disk goes bad on it
> is that you borrow a sub-optimal machine until we get you a replacement.
> 
> Development machines aren't on your desk, even if you're the only person
> who ever uses it. It might be under your desk, it might be in a machine
> room. It replicates some sub- or super-set of one or more production
> configurations, in a way which makes sense for the projects you work
> on.  The object of a dev machine is to build and test software that you
> keep in the version control system and eventually is committed into a
> production release. Along the way, it goes to alpha, QA, and beta.
> 
> A few things fall out of this approach. You can work anywhere you have
> a net connection. You pretty much can't work without one. Everyone can
> telecommute, and on snow days, most people do. If you are sick but still
> mentally functional, you can just work from home. The office net
> connections become extremely important. 

Your architecture is nice.  I guess you could say that I worked in
such an environment once.  It was OK.  If I have a dig against such an
architecture, it is this: it does require some manpower to maintain
this, and I have personally encountered very few people in my career
who could manage something like this.

In my more familiar regular environment, I expect a source control
system, a fileserver, a bug-tracking system, and email server, and I
expect that all of these have a robust backup/restore plan in place.
I manage everything on my local box, and this is where I answer
emails, write code, perform builds, and (frequently) tinker around
with other test machines to validate my code.

In general, I try to get my work done without taking up any of the
sysadmin's time whatsoever.

Regards,

--kevin
-- 
GnuPG ID: B280F24E                God, I loved that Pontiac.
alumni.unh.edu!kdc                -- Tom Waits
http://kdc-blog.blogspot.com/     





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