RE: BDB recovery after power outage

["Luke A. Kanies" <luke@madstop.com>]

On Mon, 21 Apr 2003, Tony Earnshaw wrote:

> I'd maintain that there's doco enough. It needs reading and it needs the
> mind of a Unix sysadmin, not an MCSA.

Why this casting of aspersion?  I don't understand.  Why do you assume
that, because we don't have your knowledge or haven't researched in the
same places you have, we are morons?  That's twice now that someone has
assumed that specific details show general trends:  "You didn't read all
of the BDB documentation before implementing OpenLDAP, therefore you are
an idiot and deserve what you get."

Why not instead assume that we read everything we thought was necessary
(because it is incredibly obvious that not all documentation is necessary,
and one of the skills of being a sysadmin is knowing when to stop
collecting information), but made a mistake?

I personally was confronted with either getting a linux box up and running
a virtual email server or suffer through windows.  I figured I could get
postfix, courier, and OpenLDAP running pretty quickly, and I was basically
correct.  Before everything was up to my standards, the people who owned
the machine started moving clients to it.  Then we had a power failure.

Where in this story do I mention being anything related to Microsoft?
This isn't even my day job, this is a small project I'm doing for a small
company -- consolidating about 7 boxes on NT and MacOS to one linux box.
But I suppose you've never done anything fast and dirty, and the fact that
I did something fast and dirty just eliminates the fact that I've
exclusively worked as a Unix admin for the last 6 years?  Yay.

> The problem is, who's to write the splendid doco that you'd like to see?
> I understand that there's a new book out (O'Reilly), perhaps that would
> fill the gap?
>
> Do hope that this isn't taken as a personal attack, it's not meant as
> such. Just that nobody ever taught me Unix, I learned it through my own
> curiosity. Same as Openldap.

It is meant as a personal attack, despite your statements to the contrary.
You are stating that we should have all the knowledge you do, and if we
lack that knowledge, it's our own damn fault.  I know a lot about some
stuff, not a lot about others.  Everything I know, I taught myself.  I'm
just getting started with OpenLDAP, therefore I don't know much about it.
How the hell am I supposed to learn about it without implementing it, and
making mistakes?  Then, I get stumped, ask for help, and get insulted?
Nice.

Please don't play like you've never failed to do all possible research
before asking for help; everyone has done that.  The more outside your
realm of experience a topic lies, the more likely you are to ask for help
rather than do all the research yourself, especially when you run into
problems like data loss.

We're not even getting the standard RTFM from you guys, we're getting
'RTFM you worthless moron'.

As to teaching, I was in the Education workshop at LISA in 2002, and from
what I remember, there are only about 4 programs in the country that can
teach you to be a Unix sysadmin.  Mentoring exists, but I'd say you would
not be out of line if you assumed that > 90% of Unix sysadmins are
self-taught.

Wow, I really didn't expect so much vitriol to get flung around.

Luke

-- 
  "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a
minute.  But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute, and it's longer
than any hour.  That's relativity."   --Albert Einstein