@Jacob: Python is pretty easy and because of its rigid nature will probably teach you generally good habits and thinking, plus you can use it to get a good grasp of Object oriented programming at some point. C is useful because it will give you insight into how things work and allow you to read kernel and gnu util code at at least a basic level. Plus, wrapping your head around points is good for abstraction
@coredump Bash scripting is pretty much mandatory for unixy types nowadays, though I don't really think of it as a 'programming language'. Intellectually I know that it is, but I don't really lump it into that realm.
I've configured a Group Policy Object to install Adobe Reader X, but one machine keeps uninstalling the package on start-up - even if it is installed manually.
This one machine also doesn't show Reader as an installable app in Add/Remove programs.
I've just used "sudo passwd" instead of "passwd" on a system by mistake and I'm wondering what the affect of this would be. There are two users on the system, my user account which has sudo privileges and another with sudo privileges belonging to the server administrator. The system does not have...
@ChrisS If, by root, you mean a uid 0 account? I can't really see how. Looking at the ubuntu-10.4 tag I can tell you that yes, they do in fact have a root account.
If I had to guess he's at least partially confusing the word 'account' with 'user'. Hell, damn near every service on ubuntu is going to create a new account.
For example, my single user media server (running myth) has 32 accounts.
@ChrisS I can't disagree. Since I moved to using mythbuntu things have gotten significantly easier. Hell, I recently started using boxee as my frontend and just let myth record livetv. That's been even easier to manage.
@TiZon, there is no root or any other user with a UID of 0 in the /etc/passwd
Anyway, the system is operating surprisingly well. All the services seem to be working. The only thing I can't do is use sudo or anything else to get root privileges...
I just removed root from the /etc/passwd. I can't imagine why any person would do that. It seems more likely that they would wipe out /etc/passwd completely or something else stupid. I suspect that would really break things.
@Zoredache I assume linux single drops you into the stupid rescue mode huh? Have you considered booting with a CD and re-adding root to /etc/passwd? :)
@coredump, surprisingly bad things didn't happen. All the services started up without any errors. I could still ssh in. I just could use sudo to become root
Someone claimed in a question that their Linux box has no root user at all; almost certain they're confused now. I asked in chat if it was possible; in FreeBSD the box wont even boot (last time I tried).
if your knee is dodgy I guess you have to take care all the time. With bad backs you can have good days and bad days
i try and do what i can when i've got no problems so that i can duck out of the stuff thats gonna give me problems with a clear conscience
oh yes, i placed an order for an ipad 2 today
i swear to God, don't pick one of them up if you value your wallet. I had absolutely no plans to buy one until i was in currys looking at fridges saturday and they had some ipads on display
they lure you in and the moment you pick one up it interfaces direct to the geek lobe of your brain and squeezes hard
i know people argue about which one is better but for me its like the choice between two superb meals from a top restaraunt - you go ahead prefer whatever flavours you like, but it isn't like you're actually choosing between good and bad
never got on with android, just never "spoke" to me
Random musing: Having a baseball on your desk is one of the most dangerous things an IT person can do. Two to three times a day I have the insatiable desire to throw it as hard as I can through my monitor.
where i get to explain to a room full of people why my idea to "roll our own" solution for £35k tops is better than the college's previous approach of buying expensive "middleware" layers that will cost £95k average
i'm fairly confident i'll win on the middleware layer not doing exactly what we want and needing the arse ripped out of it so much it might as well be my "roll your own" one before its usable.
me? For the OS deployment we're considering either Dell KACE tools or MS SCCM
sorry mark, no, in uk education there's a few "middleware" layers that you can buy to supposedly make deployment and management of both users and computers easier and to de-skill a lot of the tasks
I'm talking about "roll your own" in comparison to buying one of those
WDS is awesome, we use it now and rolled out 1200 machines last summer with it, but for what we're hoping to do we think we need something a bit more sophisticated
That's a good solution Mark, we considered that too and we reckon we can make it work. It's just that our in house solution is up against something that costs near enough £100k so we have the wiggle room in our budget proposal to do something a bit fancier
one objective is that our helpdesk staff, who are NOT comfortable in AD, need to be able to move computers into different rooms (aka OUs, we map offices and classrooms to OUs), allocate new software to them, remove old software and rebuild them.
And SCCM and KACE just make it easier to meet the objective of making it work for the helpdesk team instead of every little software allocation call needing to be escalated
Yeah, we have a custom application that runs before imaging is done from the WinPE and joins it in the correct OU based on what subnet it's in combined with what the computer name is.
yeah we do something similar, we allocate some software to the department OU so it goes onto all their machines no trouble and we also allocate some software to specific labs and offices, as OUs inside the department one
I think we're going to do a child domain in the same forest for lab stuff. Get that nice two-way trust happening
that way we can separate management more easily, but still have faculty resources available wherever they log in and undo the years of duplicate infrastructure
@MarkM The student, student-worker, worker issue. Figuring out what domains to put the bloody accounts into made it too annoying. So we just used different OU's and moved the accounts when the status changed.
that's kinda where we are now, @sysadmin1138 - they started with two totally unjoined domains back in netware days, created two seperate NT4 domains with trusts when they migrated to Windows NT and then moved to one domain for all user accounts when we went to AD
there's pain points whatever way you go, you're just choosing what flavour of problems you prefer imho
but having tried the complex method in the past, I've decided that i prefer a nice simple forest with as few domains as possible
Oh the joy of networking up a PC LAN full of machines to a VAX cluster with Pathworks. I mean c'mon DEC, the alpha was a nice bit of kit but it doesn't make up for DECnet or Pathworks... from hells heart I stab at thee, DEC...
Not that I'm still bitter about it or anything ;-)
Lets see if I can remember this right. The most heinous media-conversion run I ever ran into was this: Router -> 10-Base-FL -> 10-Base-T -> 10-Base-5 -> 10-Base-T -> 10-Base-5 -> Switch.
After I pointed it out, the network guys swung into work and replaced it with a Router -> 10-Base-FL -> 10-Base-T -> Switch run. Vastly, vastly better. That one database app went from launching in 5 minutes to 20 seconds.
you can just see sysadmin1138 telling this one with the torch shining up and saying "And when they opened the cabinet... the 10-base-t cable was plugged into a thicknet converter" and everyone starts screaming
@sysadmin1138 That's what I would have thought also. :) We had a lab serviced by a teacher-installed uplink run consisting of crimp-on wire connectors. Beautiful.
I don't even know how it was still working when we found it.
@BenPilbrow Well, funny thing about that. I could never get any version of it to do anything in Chrome. Apparently in FF4 it depended on how I installed the thing whether it would load.
@BenPilbrow In FF if I went to source, clicked on the file, then selected to display it in "raw" format, then it would install and show up in GreaseMonkey as a valid script but would never get executed. I had to go through the context menu to actually get it to install in such a way that it would get executed on SE pages.
If Windows Desktop versions are cheaper than Server ones, when it is advantageous to use the former in servers? Is it legal?
I've configured a Group Policy Object to install Adobe Reader X, but one machine keeps uninstalling the package on start-up - even if it is installed manually.
This one machine also doesn't show Reader as an installable app in Add/Remove programs.
