[thelist] sanctifying GNU software(was misspelled as 'Re: [thelist] sactifying GNU software' and it really bugged me)

[Garrett Coakley]

On Tue, 30 Oct 2001 17:55:47 -0800, "spinhead" <evolt at spinhead.com>
wrote:


> I'm much less afraid of GNU stuff on *nix boxes than I am upgrading to
> the latest version of MS Office, so the point here isn't that I think
> anyone's going to break anything; it's primarly a due diligence thing,
> in case something DOES break.


Right, gotcha. You're looking at more of an audit trail sort of thing.
Maybe audit isn't the best word, more a "best practice" set of
guidelines so you can trace back where a breakage might have occured? 

With stock redhat installs RPM is pretty effective at managing
dependencies and install locations, it's also available for Solaris
IIRC. That might be one way to track things. (http://www.rpm.org). 

If you can say to them "install away, but can you do it through RPM
instead of direct from source" that would clear up some of the possible
problems. They could build their own RPMs from tar.gz files and then you
would have access to the RPM database to see what exactly they were
tinkering with.

Hell, you could even set up a small machine to build the RPMs for them
and then mount it on all the machines via NFS.

Anyway, hope thats in the general area of advice you were looking for.

G.

<tip type="Using Perl to diagnose WWW problems" author="Garrett
Coakley">

The LWP library comes with a couple of nifty utilities to help diagnose
WWW problems. One of the cleverest is HEAD. This program can be used to
send requests to WWW servers. Want to see exactly whats going on when a
browser talks to a server?

[garrett at cincinnati garrett]$ HEAD http://polytechnic.co.uk
200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 12:01:18 GMT
Server: Rapidsite/Apa-1.3.14 (Unix) FrontPage/4.0.4.3 mod_ssl/2.7.1
OpenSSL/0.9.6
Content-Type: text/html
Client-Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 12:02:30 GMT
Client-Peer: 208.55.170.187:80

</tip>

-- 
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WORK: http://spiked.co.uk/
PLAY: http://polytechnic.co.uk/