I'd like to see the administrators who would want to administer a
network of 15+ million users from one central system using very low
level authentication (text based if possible). I guess it would ensure
job security for about 300 people. :)

Everything has it's place; Microsoft, Novell, Linux flavors, Open
Source, proprietary, unregulated versus government regulated,
centralized database of users versus text files...the list is endless!

Understanding when to apply / change the appropriate resource at the
right time makes us better [or at least we learn from it and keep
going].

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-kclug@marauder.illiana.net
[mailto:owner-kclug@marauder.illiana.net] On Behalf Of Jonathan Hutchins
Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2003 1:36 PM
To: Kris Bodenheimer; KCLug
Subject: Re: Novell rant, and other assorted linux rants

Kris,

With Novell/Microsoft systems that give the illusion of being managable
by the average secretary, you pay up front for the illusion of
simplification; for the programming team at Microsoft to make the
majority of the difficult decisions for you.  This may be good, but when
things start to go wrong that secretary isn't going to be much use.  In
fact, this sounds like one of those setups for "oh, that stopped working
six backup cycles ago, we didn't think we needed it", an of course now
all configuration and authentication data is hosed and the whole system
has to be rebuilt from scratch...

With Linux, there's no illusion.  You know up front that the secretary
can't administer it, instead of putting your money into the product
license, you put it into hiring and training someone competent who's job
it is to understand the network.  I think it's better for a business to
own their own intellectual capital rather than to just trust MS.  (Note
that this is a problem with products like RedHat raising their prices to
be in line with Microsoft products.  If you need to pay both the license
and the secretary vs. the license, the secretary, and the guru, guess
which product gets the job?)

The reason to keep your authentication at very low level, text based if
possible, is that if things have gone wrong it's easier to get in and
build it up layer by layer.  On a system where you need the full GUI to
do basic administration, a bad system crash may mean you can never get
the system up that far.  Same thing if you have to administer it from a
remote console - what if it's not feeling well enough to talk with the
console?