[CentOS] NetworkManager

[Valeri Galtsev]

On Sat, August 23, 2014 8:42 am, William Woods wrote:
> You are whining about something FREE
don’t like it, don’t use it
.if you
> had a PAID RHEL
> sub, upstream to Cent, on then bitch
..but whining about something free,
> well

Was I that unclear that I sounded like the one who keeps whining? I tried
to say that the moment we could affect anything has past a year or two
ago. That was the time the systemd introduction into all Linuxes was made.
It is done deal now, and the last one of the major distros - debian (and
its clones) - goes systemd in next release. So, it is not RH, it is all of
them built on Linux kernel...

And yes, I did start using something else (FreeBSD) for servers a while
ago. Also free. Also open source. Better suited for servers in my book
(your mileage may differ ;-)

Alas, not all of the decisions that are made in/by open source programmer
(steering) teams can be affected by us. They are achieved in the battles,
and there are arguments "on our side" that are made then. But. As I said
to one of my users: KDE-3 person, who hates KDE-4, stays with KDE-3 while
it lasts. Brilliant programmers who create this software need to make
progress as _they_ see it. And this (making these fundamental for us
changes) often is their only reward for the great programming job they are
doing. Let's be grateful to them.

And as we know, not all of the changes is really a progress, even if they
give you very fast boot as systemd does, or pretend to give you more
security as SELinux advertizes in its name. I was displeased by
introduction of SELinux into mainstream kernel back then. As, it is not a
good defense in a first place (can it be if you can switch it off on the
fly? and after that things are as if it is not there). On the other hand
it is extra dozens of thousands of lines of code in the kernel, which may
have bugs with security implications. Which down the road proved to be
true - search for SELinux security patch. Still, even disagreeing with
something I kept living with it for quire some time. But one day the time
came to switch servers to better (in my book; your mileage may be
different ;-) alternative. Oh, yes, I should have mentioned SELinux
competitive security solution. it was LIDS (Linux Intrusion Detection
System). The name is a bit confusing. In three words: It was sort of
kernel patch that after boot demotes root to user nobody. So after boot
you can not administer the system at all. On the fly the system is locked.
Dead locked. Makes more sense to me (security wise) than SELinux, but
SELinux made it into mainstream kernel instead of LIDS...

The suggestion you made to switch to commercial system [sorry I brought
your suggestion one step further in the same direction, oh I'm really
tricky person] is quite in line with what commercial vendors would like to
happen to free (as free beer) competitive software: users, feel this free
software is as nasty as our commercial alternative is. So you may look at
better sides of commercial software, and come back to us. This may be
strategic thought behind such events as acquisition of widest used
database mysql by most famous database company oracle. Another example may
be proving an opposite (I mean cups acquired by Apple, the reason here
could be mere survival of cups that Apple is going to keep using
themselves).

So, for good or for bad, after letting all of our steam out about bad
decisions in the system we love or used to love (and I was happy with
Linux, - RedHat and CentOS in particular, - for much longer than decade)
we can bite the bullet, realize that the life is such, and Linux from now
on is such, and start continuing our life with Linux (while the enterprise
life cycle lasts ;-) or with alternatives, - those of us who found them
more adequate.

One way or another whining of all of us who is displeased only serves to
let our own steam out.

Valeri

>
> On Aug 23, 2014, at 8:38 AM, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Sat, August 23, 2014 5:00 am, me at tdiehl.org wrote:
>>> I hate network mangler as much as the next guy but is it really worth
>>> all
>>> of
>>> the whining when all it takes to disable it is:
>>>
>>
>> It would be worth "whining about it" if anybody of decision makers ever
>> listened to these complaints. As some day "reverting to old behavior"
>> option will be gone. But most likely no one will listen to all our
>> "whining", and all the decisions are already made at least a year ago...
>> so you probably are 100% right: all our whining serves is just to let
>> our
>> own steam out. Once we realize it we start looking for alternatives, -
>> for
>> the servers at least.
>>
>> Valeri
>>
>> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>> Valeri Galtsev
>> Sr System Administrator
>> Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
>> Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
>> University of Chicago
>> Phone: 773-702-4247
>> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>> _______________________________________________
>> CentOS mailing list
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>
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++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++