Re: Who is a Debian user?
On Sun, Aug 26, 2001 at 12:36:05AM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
>
> Many people, including you, feel different. However, since this really is
> a borderline case, it's hard to tell who's right and who's wrong. And
> since it's traceroute's maintainer that gets to decide where traceroute
> ends up, it'll stay there (at least as long as Herbert Xu doesn't change
> his mind or orphanes traceroute), no matter how much time you spend trying
> to change it ;-)
I say it's pretty obvious traceroute is an administrative tool. The
only thing a user can do about his connection is to ping the server he
is trying to reach anyway. If he cannot ping the server, he will not
get more information out from traceroute that will help him fix the
problem.
a) His interface is wrongly configured. You must be root to
reconfigure it. Time to call the administrator.
b) His gateway is down. The call to the administrator will not only
tell him that it is down, he will also get a probable ETA. The user
can not do anything about this himself.
c) Something between the gateway and the server is down. The user can
not do anything about this either.
d) Loose cable between the users network card and the switch/hub.
Everyone checks the LED before evaluating network status, right? ;)
So, the only person who actually HAVE a use to know which server is
down along the way to the server is the administrator. Unless the user
is empowered to call the service provider and complain to them
himself, but then I doubt he has a problem finding 'traceroute' to
start with anyway.
This is obviously a non-issue for everyone, except perhaps for NT
administrators that has to answer questions about OSes he doesn't know
anything about. But that would be like hiring a Linux guy to sit at
the helpdesk for Win2K users. 'Just start the freaking command shell
and stop asking me which icon to right-click!'. ;)
//Humming
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