[CentOS] Flame war police

Mark Haney mark.haney at neonova.net
Tue Oct 10 15:22:02 UTC 2017


On 10/10/2017 11:03 AM, Andrew Holway wrote:
> Hiya everyone,
>
> Is there a way to disable a thread that has degenerated into flaming? The
> recent "discussion" on /var/run descended into some quite nasty places and
> perhaps a lid should have been put on it. This seems to happen every few
> weeks and is somewhat embarrassing when I'm trying to persuade people of
> the "active and friendly Centos community"
>
> It was a shame that no one actually read past the belligerence his original
> post enough to come up with a solution. It was quite clearly a problem with
> third party packages not coming with SELinux policies.
Also just as clearly, everyone on the list said this wasn't standard 
CentOS practice, the third party repo/packages OP used was not built 
properly and to either find a package that did, or compile from source.  
At no point will anyone on this list try to fix a 'problem' by ignoring 
the 40+ years of UNIX design.  Liability aside, if someone doesn't like 
what the majority say on the list, that's their problem.  Trying to 
stick persistent data in /var/run isn't standard (or best) practice and, 
indeed, /var/run is literally designed to not be persistent.  Any sane 
admin wouldn't countenance that, and most of us are sane, and experienced.

Let me ask, would you allow your kids to do something that was obviously 
dangerous?  This is the same thing.  We're here to guide those willing 
to learn the /best/ method of resolving problems. Some aren't willing to 
learn and refuse to believe the majority here know what we're talking 
about.  The true answer to OPs question wasn't what he wanted to hear 
and continued ad nauseum to insist that's what he wants to do.  
Sometimes people just have to fail to learn.

Most of us make a living in IT, and get paid to do things within the 
parameters of the systems we manage.  How hard is it to understand such 
a simple concept? What you insist on calling a flame war, was some of 
us, me included, trying to get people to understand that 1) OP is wrong 
trying to do it this way 2) that OPs package wasn't standard CentOS 
packaging and was dangerous to use on CentOS systems and 3) that there's 
no way any of us would offer a work around for something that will 
almost certainly result in lost data.

OP appeared, to me at least,  to be quite immature in insisting going 
against how CentOS (and RHEL) is designed and would very likely have 
come back to the list raising hell over losing data and how it's our 
fault for his inability to listen to us. Don't you think that would have 
been a bigger blow to the 'active and friendly community' if we'd 
actually offered advice contrary to design/best practice?  Would you 
take advice from someone you know has given dangerous advice in the past?

We have this discussion on every list I've ever been, or currently are 
on about every 6 months or so.  I do my best to contribute to the list 
as often as I can, but I can't help people when they are deadset on 
doing dangerous things.  Posts like his, and posts like yours make it 
harder for me to bother trying to help those unwilling to listen.  I 
don't take it from my children, and I certainly won't from adults who 
won't listen.

-- 
Mark Haney
Network Engineer at NeoNova
919-460-3330 option 1
mark.haney at neonova.net
www.neonova.net




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