Re: Linuxconf-equivalent on 7.1

[ABrady <kcsmart kc rr com>]

On Sun, 6 May 2001 14:18:31 -0400 fred smith
<fredex fcshome stoneham ma us> spake unto us:

> I'm playing around with 7.1 on a "spare" machine, learning its foibles
> and deciding if I want to upgrade my stable 6.2 or not at this time.
> 
> One thing I note is that the release notes on the CD indicate that
> linuxconf is deprecated. (which seems strange given that RH was funding/
> supporting the development of linuxconf). What it doesnt' say is what
> is being made available as a replacement for linuxconf.

It's there. Just better hidden from accidental misuse. Try rpm -q
linuxconf and see if it's already installed. If it is, the binary is now
in /sbin so you may have to use the full path when suing from a user
account.
 
> having just spent an hour digging through the menus on the default Gnome
> desktop (as both a user and as root) I cannot find any tools there that
> seem to be such a replacement. There are tools for some of the things,
> but there doesn't seem to be any single comprehensive sysadmin tool.
> 
> Specifically, there doesn't seem to be any GUI tool on any of the menus
> that can be used to add a new user or modify an existing one. Does this
> mean we are expected to fall back on the old adduser commandline tool?
> I don't mind doing that, I usually work at a commandline anyway, but 
> what about all the people who don't have a clue what to do at a
> commandline?

I've put linuxconf down in the past and felt completely justified. So I
believe, in fairness, that I should point out its improvements with the
new release.

It now has a quit-without-acting mode, as well as the previous
quit-check-ask mode that it had before. It also has and act/make changes
mode in which (if I recall correctly) it still shows what it's going to do
and making sure that's what you want.

I've tried it out a total of 3 or 4 times since I've installed it. I can
say this particular version hasn't made any changes that it wasn't
supposed to make. The older ones liked to change sendmail.cf files without
me noticing. It would also change permissions for no apparent reason that
I could find, even in directories that I made only for my own use on my
own system. This release hasn't done that (yet) so far as i can tell.

I don't recall what modules are preinstalled and which you have to
manually add. But, I remember I had to go in and manually add a couple
that I wanted to test. So, it appears the offending modules are
deliberately left out in the initial install, with the capability to add
in others for the folks like like to take large risks (sendmail and dns to
name a couple). The modules are on the system, just not setup to work with
linuxconf by default.

Since versions of some programs change regularly, and configuration files
change about as often (hello, sendmail), I think it should have been this
way all along and let users decide if they wanted to take chances with the
configs or would like to modify modules themselves, or just happen to have
the version the module was written to configure.

I swore off this thing a long time ago. But, since this was an initial
install, I thought I'd test it to see if it still wrought havoc. For me,
so far, it hasn't. I may give it a little more of a testing on another
system soon to see how much it's improved or not. But, I fear it a little
less than I once did.

-- 
Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product.