Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

this one is really nice: http://www.infoworld.com/print/151276

Ouch, I feel like I just looked in a mirror and saw a great big # on my forehead.

As an aside about sudo though, anyone contemplating using it should really have a look at the security lists and ponder how such a simple, security critical tool could possibly contain so many bugs. It's frankly terrifying.

I never quite understood the great rationale for sudo. The extra keystrokes are annoying...

I have to disagree with the article about the emacs thing, though. Emacs is one of the two major Unix editors, and many great programmers and other Unix people love using emacs. It's been that way for a few decades now. Comparing emacs to MS Word is unfair, as emacs is at its core a Lisp interpreter that has editing functions built-in. It's Unix's answer to the IDE, without the IDE. There are some really cool things that are possible, like SLIME:

http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/

There is also the "mg" editor which is very tiny, and has most basic emacs functionality, but without a Lisp interpreter. mg is part of the OpenBSD base system, from what I understand.

Personally I prefer "nvi", the BSD reimplementation of Bill Joy's original vi -- no special features, just vi.

No competent sysadmin should be barred from using "sudo tcsh" or similar. The point is to not have to memorize all the root passwords, not to try to restrict what full-fledged sysadmins can do. Yes, systems requiring root password to enter single-user threw a bit of a wrench into this, but I still find it plenty convenient. And if your site chooses to use only a few root passwords across many machines, you can at least limit the exposure from every sysadmin typing those passwords all the time, to each using their own all the time. May be futile in cases where that really matters, e.g. shoulder surfing, but it's a small improvement.


We call that "vi" - vim is vim, and I don't care for replacing vi with not-vi. But I acknowledge this is a personal preference.

What vi really has going for it is universality. I prefer to use emacs for serious editing, like coding/scripting. But as a sysadmin I needed to be able to edit files on any random UNIX-like system, and that meant being able to get the job done with vi (and sometimes ed! Thank you Ultrix installer/miniroot...).

no doubt vi is *the* standard.
as for sudo, the idea itself of becoming root without having the root password is really silly so i totally agree with the article.

If I understand the situation correctly, as part of the BSD code cleanup following the lawsuits from USL, the BSD people needed to reimplement vi, so they made nvi ("new vi") and released it in 4.4 BSD-Lite. The original vi is now only common on commercial Unix systems. The code for this original vi implementation is now open source, but not in wide circulation, and not used by default for any open source Unixes. So I guess Bill Joy's original code is most likely to be found on commerical Unix systems.

The original vi looks like it hasn't been touched in quite awhile: http://ex-vi.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ex-vi/ex-vi/