[rt-users] Why I am recommending 3.6 over 3.8 to my boss

[Wes Modes]

Agreed.  One sysadmin managing a score of mission-critical servers and a
half dozen projects does not allow much time for one-offs and special
cases.  Over my 25 years of sysadmin experience, I've learned that the
most efficient thing I can do as a sysadmin is to allow the package
management system to do much of my work for me.

There are legacy systems I inherited with their spaghetti installations
of all special-case software and manual hack builds and their touchy
interdependencies that I am still afraid to do much more than basic
security updates of the OS.

Wes

On 11/5/2010 5:11 AM, Vick Khera wrote:
> On Nov 5, 2010, at 5:26 AM, Robert Grasso wrote:
>
>> This is my own opinion : as you increase your Unix/Linux/RedHat skills, you will feel less concerned by such issues.
> As you increase the number of systems you need to manage, you will feel more concerned by such issues.
>
> A good package manager to manage all of your software is essential to configuration management on a large scale.  We even go so far as to make internal packages of our own software to deploy to the servers -- nothing is manually done, except for the one-off office server which does the file/mail serving.
>
> As you note later in your message, you have to manually go in and fix up things when you upgrade other parts of your system.  This is the job of your package manager.  It does not scale to do this by hand.