Re: Debian, too easy?

["nate" <debian-user@aphroland.org>]

Paul Johnson said:

> I was thinking wasteful underkill, since you lose flexibility with a
> monolithic registry rather than the nice layout of /etc.


some UNIX's do have a form of registry.  AIX for example, I remember
earlier this year while trying to fix a AIX 4.3.x machine(I forget
what the problem was) I made a change to a file in /etc, it was resolv.conf
or hosts or nsswitch.conf or something ..and the system ignored the
change. it was only when I made the change through SMIT(AIX's admin
tool) that the system accepted the change(it has some sort of DB
backend..)

also, on recent versions of solaris(8 and 9 I think) there is some sort
of registry, I remember when playing around in the sun management console,
a registry app which fired up and had some sort of database. Not sure what
it stored(but they did refer to it as a 'registrty'). I've never had
a solaris box not take a setting manually set in /etc yet though unlike
that AIX system.

AIX is screwed up as it is though, I mean I was shocked to learn to
load SSH on startup I had to put it in /etc/inittab! wtf! (maybe that
was AIX 4.2..I keep gettin the 2 versions confused)

nate