Softpanorama

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)
Home Switchboard Unix Administration Red Hat TCP/IP Networks Neoliberalism Toxic Managers
(slightly skeptical) Educational society promoting "Back to basics" movement against IT overcomplexity and  bastardization of classic Unix

Classic BSD Unix Heritage Links

News

Slightly Skeptical View on Enterprise Unix Administration

Recommended Books

Recommended Links

 Reference

System administration

Free DOS

Linux
minidistributions

Internals

Redistibutable Tutorials

 OS history

HOW-TOs

OS history

Solaris Specific Information

Man Pages

Web-based tests

 Humor

Etc

Mastery of UNIX, like mastery of language, offers real freedom.
The price of freedom is always dear, but there's no substitute.
 Personally, I'd rather pay for my freedom than live in a bitmapped,
pop-up-happy dungeon like NT.
- Thomas Scoville

UNIX Philosophy and Fundamentals

Food for thought: Those who have not already read Dan Bernstein's pages about his issues with Unix might want to.  He's prickly, but it's worth putting up with. There are a few things in there that perhaps should influence future work at freestandards.org, other standards bodies, or maybe individual distributions.  At the very least, he makes you think.

Although Linux is the most popular flavor of Unix now and more books published about Linux that for other free UNIXes, it's actually not the best implementation of Unix and one should not limit oneself to Linux only.

FreeBSD now experiences some kind of Renaissance on the desktop as many people oppose introduction of systemd. OpenBSD is  an interesting choice and is still probably a reasonable choice for ISPs due to much better security in comparison with Linux and actually with any other flavor of Unix.  

The main redistributable online sources of intro level Unix knowledge are Unix System Administration by  Frank G. Fiamingo( The Ohio State University),  Unixhelp, USail and Linux DocumentationProject,

Unix is one of the IT world's few living legends. It has been in continuous use since its birth in 1969, and its storied past is like that of a nation: Inept rulers brought it to the brink of ruin, a dictator was deposed by a public rebellion, coalitions were made and dissolved, party loyalists inflamed passions by defecting to the other side and, for a time, anarchy reigned. For corporations, Unix's journey through adolescence was anything but fun. </

Corporate users rode out Unix's growing pains, in part by ignoring vendor pleas to install every new OS upgrade. Unix is no fire-and-forget endeavor. It takes months to tweak out a Unix server for optimal performance and stability. But once you find that elusive combination of hardware, OS version, and patches, you leave it alone. Unix has endured because, when it is tuned, a Unix box is a magnificent beast. It seems able to shoulder any load, and it'll run and run until something melts.

Many believe that Linux hurt commercial Unix by doing for free what expensive operating systems had done for years. That's sadly true for SCO and SGI, but IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard have thrived in the Unix renaissance brought about by Linux. Using Linux as a teaching tool, universities are once again graduating Unix-literate administrators and developers. Linux knowledge isn't directly applicable to enterprise Unix systems, but Linux experience creates a solid foundation for enterprise training as well as an understanding of why Linux has not replaced Unix. Commercial Unix development, particularly bug fixes and enhancements, is spurred ahead by the knowledge that an entire product line, even an entire company, rides on the OS.

Our snapshots look at six commercial Unix variants, giving you an idea of where each is and where each is headed. We looked at how well the variants work with a set of 10 corporate applications: Oracle 8i database, IBM WebSphere Application Server, Adobe FrameMaker 6, iPlanet Enterprise Web Server, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Sybase ASE, Lotus Domino, ChiliSoft ASP, Vitria BusinessWare, and SAP. The application score shows how many of the sets each OS supports.

Finally, we gave each an overall score to illustrate how healthy each is for work in the enterprise. The score depicts each variant's outlook, based on the pace of new development, software portability, quality of documentation and support, and market position.

SGI Irix

IBM AIX

Compaq Tru64 Unix

Hewlett-Packard HP-UX

SCO UnixWare

Sun Microsystems: Solaris

Top Visited
 Switchboard
Latest
Past week
Past month

NEWS CONTENTS

Old News ;-)

[Jun 09, 2016] Microsoft has created its own FreeBSD. Repeat. Microsoft has created its own FreeBSD

theregister.co.uk
Microsoft has published its own distribution of FreeBSD 10.3 in order to make the OS available and supported in Azure.

Jason Anderson, principal PM manager at Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center says Redmond "took on the work of building, testing, releasing and maintaining the image" so it could "ensure our customers have an enterprise SLA for their FreeBSD VMs running in Azure".

Microsoft did so "to remove that burden" from the FreeBSD Foundation, which relies on community contributions.

Redmond is not keeping its work on FreeBSD to itself: Anderson says "the majority of the investments we make at the kernel level to enable network and storage performance were up-streamed into the FreeBSD 10.3 release, so anyone who downloads a FreeBSD 10.3 image from the FreeBSD Foundation will get those investments from Microsoft built in to the OS."

Code will flow both ways: Anderson says "... our intent is to stay current and make available the latest releases shortly after they are released by the FreeBSD Release Engineering team. We are continuing to make investments to further tune performance on storage, as well as adding new Hyper-V features – stay tuned for more information on this!"

Microsoft says it will support its distribution when run in Azure.

Redmond's rationale for the release is that plenty of software vendors use FreeBSD as the OS for software appliances. That reasoning was behind Microsoft's 2012 decision to ensure FreeBSD could run as a guest OS under Hyper-V. In your own bit barns, your guest OSes are your own problem. Microsoft clearly decided it needed something more predictable for Azure, although it has in the past allowed custom FreeBSDs to run as cloudy VMs.

Of course Microsoft has also allowed Linux on Azure VMs for years, so news of the FreeBSD effort feels like an effort to ensure the platforms cloud users want are available rather than a startling embrace of open source to rank with Azure's don't-call-it-a-Linux-for-switches or the announcement of SQL Server for Linux.

But it's still just a little surprising to see Microsoft wade into development of FreeBSD: this is not your father's Microsoft.

One last thing: when Microsoft announced it would ensure FreeBSD runs on Hyper-V, NetApp was one of its collaborators. NetApp knows FreeBSD inside out, because Data ONTAP is built on it. But NetApp is absent from the vendors listed in Microsoft's announcement of its FreeBSD efforts. Which might put the kybosh on our imagined

Five Best System Rescue Discs

Super Grub Disk 0.9667 (CDROM)
by adrian15 - Mon, Oct 29th 2007 14:45 PDT

About: Super Grub Disk is a bootable floppy or CDROM that is oriented towards system rescue, specifically for repairing the booting process. Super Grub Disk is simply a Grub Disk with a lot of useful menus. It can activate partitions, boot partitions, boot MBRs, boot your former OS (Linux or another one) by loading menu.lst from your hard disk, automatically restore Grub on your MBR, swap hard disks in the BIOS, and boot from any available disk device. It has multi-language support, and allows you to change the keyboard layout of your shell.

Changes: This release fixes an important bug that made the "Fix Boot of Linux (GRUB)" option worthless for people who had GRUB files on a second hard disk. The Italian translation was improved (Accenti, ordinals, and much more.)

O'Reilly Open Source Convention - July, 24-28, 2006 - Portland, OR

Beyond the Stock Kernel: Patching and Building a Kernel for Security and Speed

Speaker(s): Steve Suehring
Presentation Date: 07/26/2006
View full description
Download presentation files

UNIX letters Anti-Foreword by Dennis Ritchie.

Dear Mr. Ritchie,

I heard a story from a guy in a UNIX sysadmin class, and was wondering
if it was true.

   The guy in this class told of a co-worker of his who was in a UNIX
   training class that got involved in UNIX bashing.  You know, like
   why is the -i option for grep mean ignore case, and the -f option for
   sort mean ignore case, and so on.  Well, the instructor of the course
   decided to chime in and said something like this:

   "Here's another good example of this problem with UNIX.  Take the find
    command for example.  WHAT idiot would program a command so that you
    have to say -print to print the output to the screen.  What IDIOT
    would make a command like this and not have the output go to the
    screen by default."

    And the instructor went on and on, and vented his spleen...

    The next morning, one of the ladies in the class raised her hand,
    the instructor called on her, and she proceeded to say something like
    this:

    "The reason my father programmed the find command that way, was 
     because he was told to do so in his specifications."

I've always wondered if this story was true, and who it was who wrote
the find command.  In the Oct. 94 issue of Byte they had an article on "UNIX
at 25" which said that Dick Haight wrote the find command along with cpio,
expr, and a lot of the include files for Version 7 of UNIX.  I don't know
where to send this message directly to Dick Haight, and I would appreciate it
if you would forward it to him, if you are able.  If you can't, well then I
hope you liked the story.  I got your mail address from "The UNIX Haters
Handbook", and would like to add this to your Anti-Forward:

   Until that frozen day in HELL occurs, and the authors of that book write
   a better operating system, I'm sticking with UNIX.
 
                                           Sincerely,


                                           Dan Bacus
                                           [email protected].
From daemon Thu Feb  9 02:22 GMT 1995
Return-Path: [email protected]
Received: from plan9.research.att.com ([192.20.225.252]) by nscsgi.nscedu.com (8.6
From: [email protected]
Message-Id:  <[email protected]>
To: danb
Date: Wed, 8 Feb 1995 21:20:30 EST
Subject: Re: story
Content-Type: text
Content-Length: 1031
Status: RO

Thanks for the story and the note.  Dick Haight was in what was
then probably called USG, for Unix Support Group (the name changed
as they grew).  Their major role was to support the system withing
AT&T, and later to turn it into a real commercial product.  He was indeed
one of the major people behind find and cpio.  This group was distinct from
the research area where the system originated, and we were somewhat put
off by the syntax of their things.  However, they were clearly quite useful,
and they were accepted.

Dick left AT&T some years ago and I think he's somewhere in South 
Carolina, but I don't have an e-mail address for him.  I'm not sure what
he thinks of find and cpio today.  That group always was more concerned
with specifications and the like than we were, but I don't know enough
about their internal interactions to judge how these commands evolved.
All of your story is consistent with what I know up to the punchline,
about which I can't render an opinion!

Thanks again for your note.

       Dennis
Re:Plan 9 is old hat (Score:5, Insightful)
by mindstrm on Sunday April 28, @11:27AM (#3424641)
(User #20013 Info) I think you should re-read what plan9 is all about. It's not about everything-is-a-file. That's unix.

Plan9 is in no way unix.

It tried (and succeeded) to do several things.

Plan9 removes the distinction between operating system, library, and application. These are things that an OS researcher cares about but a user doesn't.

So if you are developing plan9 apps, you *never* worry about the actual hardware. You worry about the program itself. The systems guys can map it to whatever hardware they want later.
You create your own personal computing environment the way you like it, and that environment can be mapped onto whatever sized plan9 installation you find later.

Yes.. it makes everything a file, or more accurately, every resource has a name in a tree-like structure. (not so much that everything is a file but a file is just another resource).
communications between resources is via a standard protocol (9p) that can be networked.

A system like you are proposing COULD go on top of plan9. That's more of a programming level thing than an OS level thing.

The thing is, plan9 offers no real benefit to a single user on a single computer. Running plan9 on your laptop is of no real use.
Running plan9 on your laptop because you are developoing apps that will ultimately run on the globe-wide corporate plan9 system.. that's where plan9 excels, because the little namespace you construct on your laptop.. when you plug your laptop into the global network, you can re-map your cpus for a given application to the supercomputing cluster in shanghai, the storage vault in the Caymans, and the 12 gig removable drive on the workstation next to you, and the application you wrote sees nothing different at all.

Scientific American Science and The Citizen R.I.P. for D.I.Y. May 2002

"The art of home-brewing one's own electronic equipment is pretty much a lost one"

Several years ago I walked into Fry's Electronics in Palo Alto, Calif., and asked for an inductor. It is hardly an unusual electronic component; every radio project needs one. Yet the store clerks looked at me blankly. Fry's once had a reputation as the first stop for young engineers stocking a garage workshop. But in its components aisle, I found just a few bags of parts.

"The art of home-brewing one's own electronic equipment is pretty much a lost one," says Chuck Penson, a radio ham in Tucson, Ariz. The D.I.Y. movement that spawned the computer revolution--and inspired untold numbers of tinkerers to pursue careers in science--has stopped moving. Heathkit ceased making its electronic kits 10 years ago. Popular Electronics and Byte magazines have hung up their soldering irons. Meccano, the maker of Erector sets, went bankrupt in 2000. Last year Scientific American dropped the Amateur Scientist column, citing a long decline in readership, and Edmund Scientific sold off its consumer catalogue and shut its famous retail store in Barrington, N.J.

"It was a Mecca for the science enthusiast," recalls Nicole Edmund, vice president of marketing and sales at Edmund Industrial Optics and granddaughter of the company's founder. But the store's sales had been drooping for most of the past decade, she says, and the company wanted to focus on its more profitable optics business.

What we seem to have witnessed is the fragmentation of amateur science. Heathkit, for example, appealed to a broad range of people. Some built kits for kits' sake. Others just wanted to save money: Heathkits were usually cheaper and better than store-bought radios or TVs. As manufacturing costs went down and quality went up, though, off-the-shelf products gained the advantage. The same went for telescopes and most other gizmos. "When I got started, I could not have purchased what I could have built," says Dennis DiCicco, an editor at Sky & Telescope magazine. "Today if you want a telescope, you can afford one. You're not going to save much money if you build one."

As the market split between craftsmen and appliance owners, magazines had to adapt or die. In the late 1970s computer hobbyists of all ability levels devoured Byte. As PCs went mainstream, the magazine played down home-brew projects. Advanced amateurs, meanwhile, outgrew the projects and gravitated to niche publications. Circuit Cellar, started by ex-Byte columnist Steve Ciarcia, succeeded with a new publishing model: as its readers became more sophisticated, so did the articles. "I saw that you had to move upscale with them, or they'd move away from you," Ciarcia says.

Indeed, dedicated amateurs are now quasi-professionals. The Society for Amateur Scientists conference taking place next month in Philadelphia will have sessions on how to publish your research and how to claim a tax deduction for your basement lab. Discoveries by amateur astronomers have made headlines. At the other end of the market, people with an occasional science craving can satisfy it at, say, the Nature Company. And for those who fall in the middle, a few kit suppliers (especially in robotics and music production) and magazines (such as Nuts & Volts and Poptronics, formerly Radio Electronics) carry on.

Of course, market fragmentation is not the only trend affecting amateur science. There are more leisure activities than ever to choose from and less time to pursue them. For electronics retailers, the general decline of D.I.Y. is merely one among many changes in the industry. Brad Jonas of Green Brook Electronics in Green Brook, N.J., one of the few mom-and-pop electronics shops left in the greater New York area, talks about death by a thousand cuts. People who need parts now get them by mail-order (although they come to the store for advice), small companies buy equipment rather than build it in-house, and repair stores swap out whole modules rather than replace individual components. Even Radio Shack has had financial troubles, although the restructuring it announced last December does not affect electronic parts.

Evidently, the something-for-everyone model epitomized by Heathkit and the Amateur Scientist column can't compete anymore. Specialized sources and Internet newsgroups cater to each skill level. But much of the mentoring and serendipity that the diverse community of amateurs offered has been lost. It is hard not to regret its passing.

[Feb 22, 2000] SCO Opens Source Code for Older UNIX.
Santa Cruz Operations has made a number of straight UNIX source codes available to the public.

Small but useful introduction

See also

(Other Softpanorama Pages)

Recommended Links

Google matched content

Softpanorama Recommended

Top articles

Sites

Command line interface

Etc.

Web-based Tests

Re-distributable Resources

Unix System Administration by Frank G. Fiamingo The Ohio State University. Nice e-book
USAIL
**** Unix system administration independent learning -- USAIL. The USAIL project is both an independent study course for prospective system administrators and a reference resource. As more universities and other institutions take advantage of the World Wide Web as an educational medium, more information on system administration becomes available online. The USAIL project is an infrastructure developed to provide access to a large number of external (to the USAIL archive) Unix information resources on the internet. Only some of the documents listed were written by the Unix Workstation Support Group (UWSG) at Indiana University.
UNIXhelp
Helpful information for users of the UNIX operating system, developed at the University of Edinburgh from work funded by the ITTI. Please read this disclaimer.

UNIXhelp is mirrored around the world and freely available for local installation. This is Version 1.3.

UNIXhelp for users -mainsite

Unix variant based on the University of Edinburgh UNIXhelp.

Linux Documentation Project Guides:
Book part of LDP is mostly static with several outdated entries (Installation and getting Started is one example -- Matt Welsh wrote a better (commercial) book for O'Reilly. The most interesting and dymamic part are HOWTOs.

Non-redistributable Resources

85321 Text book table of contents -- a good textbook

A Much-Too-Terse Introduction to Unix -- Dr. Steven J. Zeil and Joe Gazala, both from ODU CS

Geek Girls UNIX help for users

Unix is a Four Letter Word

Rice university Unix library

Unix manuals (postscript versions of manuals distributed with 4.4BSD-Lite)

Unix System Administration - A Survival Course

System Administration Guide -- Caltech

Graphical Environment Documentation

FAQs

Man pages

Cyrillication

Humor

See also Softpanorama Humor Archive. Unique Collection of Open Source Related Humor for full collection

Unix History By Alan Filipski

The UN*X brand operating system was written by two computer science researchers in a closet in the attic of a famous research laboratory (The Labs) in the late 1960s. The authors had complete freedom to design an operating system according to their own wishes without management constraints. This was because everyone at The Labs, including the management, thought they were janitors who spent their time in the closet wringing out mops or something.

The first version of the UN*X brand operating system was a game that simulated the gravitational motion of all known planets and satellites of our solar system. Soon such things as a file system and user procedures were grafted onto it. It ran on a PDP-7 computer that someone had stored in the closet and forgotten about.

Later the authors made the mistake of drawing attention to themselves by asking the management for a larger computer. At this, the management took the operating system and, supposing it to be something of use only to hippies (or closet hippies), sent it University of California at Berkeley.

It may be coincidental, but at the about the same time cases of a peculiar compulsive mental disorder known as Unirexia Nervosa were first noted in San Francisco, Calif. area. The symptoms of this disorder are the interjection of nonsense words such as grep, awk, runrun, and nohup by the victim into his or her speech; the misuse of ordinary words such as cat and lint; and the avoidance of the use of uppercase letters.

Advanced cases of Unirexia Nervosa have been found at many major universities throughout the U.S., where youths with pasty complexions and sunken eyes can be found late at night subsisting on diet pop, glaring fanatically at CRT's, and mumbling about "one more bugs". Since for the most part this malady has been confined to university students, it has not cause great public alarm. But recently there have been reports of regular people contracting the disease, even some who hold otherwise respectable positions in industry. The mode of transmission of Unirexia Nervosa is not known, but it is thought to have something to do with beards.

Members of the UN*X community have developed a novel and effective means of communication with each other. Suppose a user named Athol at Epizootic Systems in Cupertino, Calif., wishes to send an electronic mail message to his friend Elba at Perjorative Systems Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif. Although their computers do not communicate directly, they message may be passed via intermediate links. Athol would merely type:

mail ihnp4!allegra!ucbvax!seismo!decvax!cbosgd!ucbvax!pejor!elba

and then enter the text of his message. This electronic mail would appear at Elba's terminal either within two days of the time it takes to propagate a telephone signal 73 times between the East and West Coasts of the U.S., whichever is greater.

Although many people think the word "UN*X" is an acronym (or even a homonym), the word actually originated in the following manner. When management in The Labs noticed the strange machine running in the closet, they stopped the first technical-looking type they saw in the hall and asked him what it was. As fate would have it, it was not a technical type at all but a member of a lost Australian aboriginal tribe who had been wandering the halls of The Lab for years without drawing attention. The fellow did not understand English and believed they were asking him to haul the computer away. He replied, "UN*X(tm)," which is aboriginal for "Not my job, man." The rest is history.

The different versions of the UN*X brand operating system are numbered in a logical sequence: 5, 6, 7, 2, 2.9, 3, 4.0, III, 4.1, V, 4.2, V.2, and 4.3.

The C programming language is descended from the languages B and BCPL (short for Bucephalus, Alexander the Great's horse). It is a highly structured language. The following structured program, for example, is well-known to all C language programmers, and prints a well-known message at the terminal (try it!): 

#define TWENTYNINE 29
int ll, L1, l0, h_1,q,h1,h;
main(){
	for(putchar(putchar((h=7)*10+2)+TWENTYNINE);
		l0?putchar(l0):!h_1;
		putchar (ll),L1==2?ll=' ':0){
	L1++==0?(ll=l0=54<<1):
		ll=='l'&&L1<3?(ll+=1L|
		1L<<1L,l0=0)
	:L1==sizeof L1&&ll==' '
		?(ll=19+h1):(q-=h1);
		L1==5?ll-=8:q&& &
	h_1;L1==sizeof ll+2?
		(ll+=3):1L;ll==(h<<4)+2
		&&L1!=6?(ll=ll-
	6):(h1=100L);L1!=1L<<3?q--
		:(h_1=ll=h1);
	}
printf("%s\n",0);
}

Note the absence of goto statements in the program. Also note how the portability of the program is enhanced by judicious use of the C preprocessor and the sizeof operator. The dereferenced null pointer at the end is used to make sure the output is properly terminated.

The most commonly used UN*X interactive command language is known as the Bourne shell. (This shell was recently completely rewritten and is now available as the Bourne-again shell.) The shell provides a uniform syntax by which the user can interact with the operating system kernel and utility programs. The utility programs in turn accept a uniform syntax of command line arguments and options. Typical examples of utilities are the ar utility, which requires single-letter options that are lumped together in a specified order with an introductory minus sign, before the other arguments; and the find utility, which has multiletter options that cannot be lumped together, each of which must be preceded by a minus sign and which follow any other arguments.

Besides being used interactively, the shell itself may be used as a programming language. Although programs written in shell are slower than equivalent programs written in C, they are shorter and easier to read and debug. For example, to add 1 to a variable a in C one would have to write:

a = a + 1;

or:

a += 1;

or even:

a++;

In shell, one need only write:

a = `expr $a + 1`

where it is essential to have spaces around the + sign to use the $ sign only before the righthand occurrence of the variable a, and to use the backward quote character instead of the common single quote. When UN*X brand operating system programmers want to develop an application quickly, they often use the shell because of this convenient syntax.

Security is a very important issue in the UN*X brand operating system world. The typical UN*X brand operating system source licensee is living in a fool's paradise, little realizing that on the streets of every major city wander broken hackers who would kill for access to kernel source code. These people may be down on their luck, but they are not stupid. As you read these words, there are people who but for lack of a quarter would be whistling uucp protocols at 1200 baud to your modem from a downtown pay phone.

Therefore, the prudent administrator should be aware of common techniques used to breach UN*X brand operating system security. The most widely known and practiced attack on the security of the UN*X brand operating system is elegant in its simplicity. The perpetrator simply hangs around the system console until the operator leaves to get a drink or go to the bathroom. The intruder lunges for the console and types rm -rf / before anyone can pry his or her hands of the keyboard. Amateur efforts are characterized by typing in such things as ls or pwd. A skilled UN*X brand operating system security expert would laugh at such attempts.

The Trojan horse strategy is used in many attempts to defeat the security of a UN*X brand operating system installation. The following scenario is typical: The UN*X brand operating administrator arrives at work one afternoon and finds a new terminal outside the system security area. Since it is better than the current system console, he brings it in to the computer. After a few minutes of use, hordes of cockroaches come pouring out of the back of the terminal, driven out by the heat. The operator jumps up to stamp them out and the intruder has his will with the system.

How can this sort of damage be prevented? The greatest weakness of the UN*X brand operating system is the fact that the superuser root is so powerful. Therefore, an important principle is simple to minimize the use of root. An ingenious way of doing this is to first, without looking, set the root password of the system to some randomly generated string of character. Do not memorize or even look at this string. Now set up the /etc/inittab file with the run level 2 flag that will cause it to demand this unknown password whenever the system is booted. The system is now secure. Log off.

What can a system administrator do if he suspects that some has broken root? Simple. First, at the slightest suspicion that someone has unauthorized access to the superuser capability, immediately seal off the computer room, sound the fire alarm, release inert halon gas into the atmosphere, and activate the automatic sprinkler system. Type "shutdown 0" and cut all circuit breakers to the computer. Physically destroy all magnetic media that have ever been mounted on or associated with the insecure system in any way. Order a new distribution and reboot.

An administrator who is aware of these methods can maintain a sufficient degree of paranoia for most applications.

It has often been said that if God had a beard, he would be a UN*X programmer. While this may be an exaggeration, it is true that UN*X brand operating system is well on its way to replacing the outmoded 10- and 15-year-old operating systems in common use today.

Todd's Humor Archive Levels of UNIX Expertise

BEGINNER: - insecure with the concept of a terminal - has yet to learn the basics of vi - has not figured out how to get a directory - still has trouble with typing RETURN after each line

NOVICE: - knows that ls will produce a directory - uses the screen editor but calls it "vie" - has heard of C but never used it - has had his first bad experience with rm - is wondering how to read his mail - wonders why the person next to him likes UNIX so much

USER: - uses vi and nroff but inexpertly - has heard of regular expressions but never seen one - has figured out that - precedes options - has attempted to write a C program and decided to stick with Pascal - is wondering how to move a directory - knows how to read his mail and wonders how to read news

KNOWLEDGEABLE USER: - uses nroff with no trouble and is learning tbl and eqn - uses grep to search for fixed strings - has figured out that mv will move directories - has learned that learn(1) doesn't help - somebody has shown him how to write C programs - once used sed to do some text substitution - thinks make is only for wimps

EXPERT: - uses sed when necessary - uses macro's in vi, uses ex when necessary - posts news at every possible opportunity - write C programs with vi and compiles with cc - has figured out what && and || are for - thinks that human history started with !h

HACKER: - uses sed and awk with comfort - uses undocumented features of vi - writes C code with cat >foo.c and compiles with !cc - uses adb because he doesn't trust source debuggers - can answer questions about the user environment - writes his own nroff macros to supplement standard ones - writes scripts for Bourne shell (/bin/sh) - knows how to install bug fixes

GURU: - writes m4 and lex with comfort - writes assembly code with cat >foo.s - uses adb on the kernel while system is loaded - customizes utilities by patching the source - reads device driver source with breakfast - can answer any unix question after a little thought - uses make for anything that requires two or more commands - has learned to breach security but no longer needs to

WIZARD: - writes device drivers with cat >foo.o - fixes bugs by patching the binaries - can answer any question before you ask - writes his own troff macro packages

- can answer any question before you ask - writes his own troff macro packages - is on first-name basis with Dennis, Bill, and Ken 

Todd's Humor Archive System Management Products (fwd)
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
From: [email protected] (Ron Christian x5545)
Keywords: original, chuckle, computers
Date: Tue, 20 Dec 94 19:30:04 EST

Announcing a exciting new tool for data center management!

When was the last time you found a bazillion zero length files in /usr/tmp and said to yourself "How did this crap get on my system?"

When was the last time you had to clean fifty megabytes of run-on puns out of a user's news directory, and said to yourself, "What a load of crap"?

When was the last time you looked at a piece of mail and said to yourself "This is the stupidist crap I've ever laid eyes on"?

Well, you're right, it is crap, and now you can do something about it.

Introducing the new Crap Detector daemon "crapd".

Crapd works similar to syslogd in monitoring system error messages, but has the added function of removing offending files and utilities from the system using complex heuristics to determine the file's "crap quotient". Sensitivity is settable anywhere from "merely inane" to "gut-wrenching anal explosion" and can be set on a per-user basis.

Files that crapd has decided meets the above criteria are held in /usr/stool for a user-settable period of time, and then flushed to /dev/dump. Anything crapd decides is true stinking diarrhea will be sent directly to /dev/dump with no questions asked.

Crapd is especially useful for cleaning out mail spool directories, as this has been proven to be one of the most prolific accumulators of crap in the history of interactive computing.

There is, of course, a list of exceptions for crap you are required, against your better judgement, to have on the system. However, if crapd decides the list is full of crap, it will be migrated to /usr/stool.

In scientific lab test, crapd has been shown to virtually eliminate user distractions, increase system performance by 50% and reduce backup volume by an order of magnitude. Our customers report that capital equipment expenditures have been reduced significantly now that they don't have to keep disks spun up just to keep the crap warm.

As an added bonus, crapd will search through your process table and kill off any processes that anyone who could grab their butt with both hands wouldn't have launched during a billion year drinking binge.

Next year, a stealth option to the crap detector daemon will be available. This option adds a new "virtual crap" feature to your file systems, which causes files that have been flushed by crapd to appear to still be there. In carefully controlled lab tests, we have found that users will happily continue to append Dan Quayle jokes to a file for years without ever realizing that the directory entry has been faked and the file no longer exists.

So, be productive, be pure, get the Crap Detector!

Warning: Be sure to put Usenet News in the exceptions list, or crapd is sure to unlink the news spool directory, shoot nntpd, and set fire to your incoming news link.

Brought to you by Waste Products, Inc.

"If it's a Waste Product, you'll know it!"

-- Ronald O. Christian, 1993

Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes :  Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce :  Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

Copyright © 1996-2021 by Softpanorama Society. www.softpanorama.org was initially created as a service to the (now defunct) UN Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) without any remuneration. This document is an industrial compilation designed and created exclusively for educational use and is distributed under the Softpanorama Content License. Original materials copyright belong to respective owners. Quotes are made for educational purposes only in compliance with the fair use doctrine.

FAIR USE NOTICE This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to advance understanding of computer science, IT technology, economic, scientific, and social issues. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided by section 107 of the US Copyright Law according to which such material can be distributed without profit exclusively for research and educational purposes.

This is a Spartan WHYFF (We Help You For Free) site written by people for whom English is not a native language. Grammar and spelling errors should be expected. The site contain some broken links as it develops like a living tree...

 You can use PayPal to to buy a cup of coffee for authors of this site

Disclaimer:

The statements, views and opinions presented on this web page are those of the author (or referenced source) and are not endorsed by, nor do they necessarily reflect, the opinions of the Softpanorama society. We do not warrant the correctness of the information provided or its fitness for any purpose. The site uses AdSense so you need to be aware of Google privacy policy. You you do not want to be tracked by Google please disable Javascript for this site. This site is perfectly usable without Javascript.

Last modified: June 05, 2021