Re: horse carcas flogging (was: traceroute in /usr/bin, not /usr/sbin)
On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, Steve Greenland wrote:
> So you're doing basic network diagnostics. It's an admin *function*
> (as opposed to composing and sending e-mail, for instance). You'd
> be completely justified in throwing the entire job in your admin's
> lap. However, you figure (probably correctly) that you're more likely to
> get the problem solved (or figure out a useful bounce machine) if you
> provide more info than "I can't reach master.debian.org.) I bet it was
> little or no effort for you find traceroute when you did this. On the
> other hand, there
> It's just that I can't believe that there is a non-nil set of people
> who can figure out what to do with the output of traceroute, but can't
> change their PATH, or use an alias, or add a link to their own ~/bin, or
> simply type /usr/sbin/traceroute. Thus, I can't figure out why certain
> people are so vehement about their insistance that it be moved. If
> there were no history, I'd say get rid of the sbin directories entirely.
Adding traceroute to your path, or adding an alias, or a link to ~/bin, is
easy -- if you have to do it *ONCE*. I have fourteen Linux boxes on the local
network alone, I have three to four on-line at home at any given time, and
I've lost count of how many Linux servers I have accounts on off-site, both
work-related and not. It is a royal pain in the ass that I have to make
changes to my non-root account on *every single one* of these machines before
I can use this simplest of networking tools without typing an explicit path,
knowing full well that the traceroute could end this once for all, for me and
for others like me, simply by providing a compatibility link in /usr/bin. On
many machines this is the only program in /usr/sbin I ever have cause to run
as a non-root user, and the keystrokes I've spent on this discussion pale in
comparison to what traceroute's "adminhood" has cost me and will cost me over
the lifetime of my career as a network administrator.
I just checked with one of my fellow network administrators, who is also a
Linux geek. He confirms that on average, he uses traceroute two to three
times *a day* as part of his job, and that it's so unreliable that the machine
(potentially belonging to any of 50 different customers) he's tracerouting
from has an account with a configured $PATH that /usr/sbin has become part of
muscle memory for him. With tab completion, that's 6 key strokes per
instance, 18 letters per day, and 4500 in a year assuming he never needs it on
weekends or holidays[1]. Knowing that my friend types around 60 wpm, and
bumping that up to 70 on account of not having to think about typing this
particular sequence, that still amounts to over 10 minutes a year spent typing
just the /usr/sbin part of the traceroute command[2].
In comparison, this missive numbers among its contents roughly 3400 characters
of my composing. You might look on this as a positive thing, then, that in a
year's time debian-devel is spared one or two of my posts because I've been
busy typing /u<tab>sb<tab>.
How many other people are in the same situation? Or would you like to tell me
now that we're the only people not using mtr[3], and that it's our own fault
for having muscle memory keyed to the one network tracer that's so ubiquitous
you can even find it under Windows 95?
Does *this* argument make more sense to you? While you people are busy
drawing lines in the sand and arguing what is and isn't an admin tool, there
are actual people *using this operating system* whose work habits are impacted
by the choice to place traceroute in /usr/sbin. *This* is the reason why
anything that non-admin users would actually run belongs in /usr/bin. It is
not blind policy, it is a rule intended to benefit the users of the operating
system. And if this rule suggests sendmail merits a compatibility link in
/usr/bin as well, then I'm all for that, too.
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer
[1] And who ever heard of a network administrator with an 8-to-5 workday?
[2] One more statistic for shits and giggles: 15 minutes of his time would
cost one of our customers 30 USD.
[3] Which by all accounts should be in the same place as traceroute, unless
you buy into the 'traceroute is dangerous and evil' or 'random placement
of utilities on the filesystem is a Good Thing' schools of thought.
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