Re: AYT? Support network, anyone up to?

[George Bonser <grep@oriole.sbay.org>]

Just to give an example of what Linux is up against:

I installed an early bo system in our company headquarters as a SAMBA
print server. It was an old 486 that was headed for the scrap heap. One
Friday evening someone decides to send a print job to one of the printers
and it was owned by a user that had no alias on the main mail server.  The
print job was 0 bytes long and the Apple Laserwriter that the job was
being sent to kept rejecting it.  

The print server attempted to notify the sending user that the job had an
error but the main mail server refused the mail. On Monday I get a page
since I was on a long-term contract in San Jose and the in-house sysadmin
is complaining that the postmaster mail is filled with error messages from
the Linux box. She says I need to get rid of it since she does not know
how to work on it.  It turns out that she simply needed the root password
and I walked her through finding the bad job and removing it with lprm
(and then she comments, Gee, this is just like SunOS printing)

The damage was done, however, and that machine was shortly taken out of
service with a reputation that Linux does not work as well as NT. This is
because the admin that was there is partial to NT and NT does not attempt
to warn the sending user by email if there is an error, it just logs it
locally.

The proper fix was to add that local user on that old Sun IPC to the
system-wide NIS alias database and everything would have been fine. That
was done a few days later anyhow when the user complained that he could
not get email.

There is a lot of bigotry that needs to be overcome and some people are
"spring loaded" to blame Linux if you install it and there is any kind of
a problem.  It can certainly be a challange.


George Bonser

If I had a catchy quip, it would be here.

http://www.debian.org
Debian/GNU Linux ... the maintainable operating system.


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