Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2000 16:43:56 -0500 From: "C. Stephen Gunn" <csg@physics.purdue.edu> To: Sue Blake <sue@welearn.com.au> Cc: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Outdated rdist in FreeBSD Base Message-ID: <200004182143.QAA04365@dustdevil.waterspout.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 19 Apr 2000 06:58:00 %2B1000." <20000419065759.W3179@welearn.com.au>
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On Wed, 19 Apr 2000 06:58:00 +1000, Sue Blake wrote: Let me start by saying that it wasn't my intention to offend anyone, simply to improve FreeBSD. >But what of the site that has scores of servers that have been using >rdist for years, that upgrades FreeBSD and finds that a system failure >is due to rdist suddenly being absent, installs the new program named >rdist with the higher version number, changes the scripts to suit it, >and has two consecutive nights of failed crons before discovering that >the two "versions" of rdist are different programs? I don't think "Systems Failure" and "Daily Duties as a SysAdmin" are necessairly equivalent. Surely it's someone's job to be aware of these issues at your organization. >If 50 machines of various types suddenly have to have a new rdist >compiled on each of them, this represents a real $ cost. At least it'd >be nice to know before the incident rather than after, and the forced >solution should involve changing the least number of machines. I compile and install rdistv6 for all of my machines now. Admittedly my network is small (60-70 UNIX hosts of different architectures, and 500 total nodes). I rarely upgrade systems, applications or utilities like this without cause. >other systems. For example, at my work we have a particular Dynix/ptx >system that has refused to compile most of what has been tried, I have some experience on Sequent systems, and while the're somewhat cumbersome to deal with, a new version of rdist isn't exactly a complex application (akin to Oracle, or even Sendmail or Bind). >If the alternative is to provide a second port, then people need to be >warned when upgrading FreeBSD that rdist no longer exists in the base >system, and the differences between the ports needs to be explained >well to the majority who haven't heard of these incompatibilities >before. We're talking about the potential cost of two nights of >network-wide cron failures plus adding a new program to multiple >non-FreeBSD systems under time pressure. I don't mean to be overly critical here, but your nightly cron scripts should be more fault tolerant than that. Don't you try some "dry run" rdists to a new machine on your network before "setting it loose?" >But let's get this into perspective. Hell, if that kind of problem only >happens to one or two large commercial sites and to nobody that we know >personally, I guess it's not very important, is it? :,) I understand your concerns, but this is a well documented situation, rdist 6 has been around for years. This is why (at O'brien's request) I brought it up on -arch instead of just having him commit the change we discussed. >I would argue, referring to its documentation, that rdist6 expects to >find the old rdist on the system somewhere with the name "oldrdist" in >order to do all that it can do. Therefore if there is not an "oldrdist" >file included with the base system (my preference), it should be >installed _with_ the rdist6 port in order to offer rdist6's complete >functionality. That would not solve all of the problems I have raised >(rdist still disappears to ports), but it would be a compromise that >would show some respect for those using FreeBSD seriously. How long should we maintain this backward compatability? Sometime, someday, you simply have to say "everybody not running rdist 6 is screwed." We had to do this with ELF vs AOUT, which was significantly more severe. My suggestion was motivated because some of our vendors (Linux mostly) have already said "use rdist 6." (or worse, they simply say use rsync, cause it's better, which it ain't). Right now I have to _REMOVE_ rdist v5, and install rdist v6 by hand for my network. The work isn't killing me, but I think it's wrong to continue shipping an out-of-date component that has known problems in future versions of FreeBSD. Before I completely go insane here, I'm headed to look at rdist v6 and rdist v5 to see exactly what these incompatabilities are. - Steve -- C. Stephen Gunn, Computer Systems Engineer <csg@physics.purdue.edu> Physics Computer Network, Purdue University To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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