x9200 wrote:Thank you for the complements but I truly think these are the basics any sysadmin of unix-like system should know. I don't know, maybe I am just biased as I come from the generation where the text mode was a norm. I remember I was kind of shocked working for the first time on an Indigo2 workstation, that Irix got some graphical tools to handle some of the configuration files In this case probably rather silly of me as the graphics was always the selling attribute of any of the SGI machines.
Funny you should mention SGI. I am writing an article for another site on the history of virtualization going back to 1959, throught the Manchester Atlas, various IBM mainframes and touching on the Cray offerings (Intel based history is for part 2
). I was unaware that SGI bought out Seymore Crays initial company in 1996. I do also remember a demo at University by a SGI slesperson showing a rotating realtime rendored 3D image which was was pretty jaw dropping as it was around the time when dedicated 3D graphics cards had just started to arrive for the PC market.
x9200 wrote:I would say majority of the boot CDs will not mount anything unless requested. Also I believe what goes to fstab on any linux machine regardless the distribution is pretty much the same at least in the discussed context. You have to know the physical device and the partition, file system and mounting point. Even less, you can mount first it by hand and mount will attempt to recognize the FS.
Sure but with a Live DVD you could use parted to show the devices and partitions, click on the partition you want and then click on the mount button (entering the mount point if needed).
x9200 wrote:One thing to clarify: I do not question the usefulness of live-CDs in general. I question the need of having such CD in every distribution for the purpose of recovery or other administrative tasks.
The distribution value-add is in the differences. Without a Live-DVD for the separate distributions, how are they to allow the users to experience the differences without having to install ?.
I do get the point about the diffeneces between boot and live CD/DVDs and it is a very valid one. Some people just feel more at ease with a GUI to fix basic issues which potentially has a shallower learning curve than to have to do it from the command line. I, personnaly, am more of a command line person myself but in some cases, like needing to edit the fstab on a non booting system, I do find it as easy if not more so to use a live DVD (or possibly a boot DVD with sepcific tools) than to try to remember the mount parameters to get it to remount an already mounted partition as rw on another mount point. The boot partition is mounted as standard RO on entry to the recovery console which makes it a real pain to sort a simple issue out.
x9200 wrote:
It's GX270, pretty old one.
Thanks. Will take a look.
x9200 wrote:I have not enough data to justify this or that way. From the basic command line tools I miss the whois client but it does not make it bad or good as a whole.
How can you tell something is a good or bad Server distribution? I think this is what you meant as the system is pretty much the same?
Subjective IMO, but surely stability beyond what you would be willing to reasonably accept as a baseline for a desktop OS would be a good indicator. Uncluttered would be another which is why I tend to like CentOS minimal as a base install then add as needed. I am sure there are many more criteria a server OS could be measured against but as a free Server OS, there seems to be a concensus that CentOS is a pretty good bet. People will have varying opinions though as one size rarely fits all.
I also rarely use WhoIs
.
RB
Without dialogues, if you tell them you want something real bad, you will get it real bad.