Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1998 15:40:56 -0600 From: "G. Adam Stanislav" <zen@buddhist.com> To: "Jasper O'Malley" <jooji@webnology.com>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: broken pipe Message-ID: <3.0.6.32.19981229154056.00798740@mail.bfm.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.02.9812291436010.24852-100000@mercury.webnology .com> References: <3.0.6.32.19981229143320.00893360@mail.bfm.org>
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At 14:45 29-12-1998 -0600, Jasper O'Malley wrote:
>> I think that is a good idea. It would have been nice if FreeBSD had just
>> said: "Well, I could not install it all, would you like me to delete the
>> few docs I did install?"
>
>It'd be nice, but I'm going to assume you were root when you did the
>install. Root can do whatever root wants; it's a feature, not a bug. If
>you tell FreeBSD, as root, to cram 50MB onto 10MB of disk space, it'll try
>to do so. With ultimate power comes ultimate responsibility ;)
Yes, I understand, and it has worked fine for decades when Unix was used by
corporations and universities who had an expert system administrator. But
as more and more people get fed up with Windows and migrate to FreeBSD (or
other Unix clones, but FreeBSD seems to me the one that makes the most
sense switching to), we will see more and more individual FreeBSD
installation, where the individual is the root as well as the only user
without being an expert.
I mean, take cars as an analogy. When the car was first invented, you had
to crank it up by hand, and you had to deal all problems personally. There
were few drivers and even fewer cars. Nowadays (in the US, anyway),
everyone is a driver and almost everyone has a car. Most drivers know how
to add antifreeze, but not how to deal with system failures. If a car
manufacturer said that if you can open the hood, you have the power to fix
all problems by yourself, he would not be making cars for long. It does not
matter how powerful the car is. In fact, Cadillac is easier to use than Chevy.
And I did not suggest the system should have deleted the docs without
asking me.
Yes, I was a root, but only because I had to be in order to do the install.
I would never have asked it to dump 50 Meg to 10 Meg of disk space, had I
know how big it was. Again, every single Windows install I ever used,
started by checking if there was enough space on the disk. If FreeBSD had
told me in advance I did not have enough space, and I had said, go ahead do
it anyway, I could not complain, of course. (And I am not complaining even
now, I was simply asking how I could do better in the future.)
At this point in time, I would *love* to tell all my clients to ditch
Windows and go with FreeBSD. But my clients are small business owners who
do not have the time to become experts in computer operating systems, nor
do they have the budget to hire a full-time system administrator.
What choice does that leave me but to suggest they swith from Win95 to
WinNT, a system that is expensive and bloated, with much less power than
Unix, but relatively easy to use. Meanwhile, Gates Motel is laughing his
way to the bank for selling mediocre products.
>It's also one of the reasons everyone recommends keeping up-to-date backups.
Yes, of course. I did have my own stuff elsewhere, I just had to go through
the trouble of reinstalling it. At least this time I was more familiar with
the process.
One *nice* thing (user-friendly) it did was hang up the phone after the
install. I was reinstalling the system via ftp, late at night, and lay down
while waiting, just to fall asleep. When I woke up in the morning, I jumped
out of the bed thinking I had been connected to the Internet all night
long, but the modem was offline <whew>.
Adam
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