[CentOS] Appreciate the help...

Thu Jan 24 03:23:46 UTC 2008
Stephen Harris <lists at spuddy.org>

On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 10:12:13PM -0500, Scott Ehrlich wrote:
> To answer several people's curiosities of why I keep pushing - when I'm 
> tasked with a quest, I try to tap all my resources, including this list, to 
> find a solution.  One never knows when an answer might be obvious, or 
> perplexing, as this question seems to have been.   To some, an answer is 

I've found, in the past, that questions like this are normally indicative
of the wrong question being asked.  People are trying to put controls in
the wrong place, thinking this is the solution to an underlying problem.

When this happens at work I ask people to take a step back and to describe
the problem they're trying to solve.  "No, you don't want cron to do
xyz...  explain what you think the problem is you're trying to solve in
non technical terms".  Very frequently there's alternate solutions to
the problem.  The "noexec" idea someone suggested was one such attempt.

Historically this has been called "thinking outside the box", but I
prefer to think of it as analysing the real problem, what are you trying
to solve; not "can this technology do blah".

-- 

rgds
Stephen