[Discuss] tcsh, AD, and RHEL 5.6

[invalid at pizzashack.org (Derek Martin)]

On Fri, Sep 07, 2012 at 07:34:52AM -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> We have a similar issue as we moved from a locally administrated NIS to
> a globally administered LDAP (administered in Ottawa). While I can get
> the shell changed by emailing one of the IT guys in Toronto it is the
> same issue. (There are LDAP tools on the system to do this but the LDAP
> database is readonly). AD is even worse. You really have to contact an
> IT guy. One of the related issues we have is that now since we are using
> the same LDAP that will be used in Toronto, those people who work on Sun
> systems in TOR are stuck with TCSH because the Sun systems do not have
> BASH on them. 

But they almost certainly do have a /bin/sh.  On recent Solaris
machines, I believe this is now usually the POSIX shell, which is not
identical to bash but similar enough, if you avoid bashisms.  It's
rare these days that Unix systems ship with /bin/sh = the original
Bourne shell.  So, set their shell to /bin/sh, and make sure that is
bash on your linux systems, and everything should be hunky-dory.  I
know debian uses dash by default now, but in almost 20 years of
managing Linux systems, I've always used bash as the system shell,
even on production servers, and it's never caused a problem.  Though,
if the RC scripts are specifically written with dashisms, that could
be problematic.  This is one of the many reasons I don't like debian.
If your system is hosed, you're probably going to boot from a rescue
disk anyway...


> Basically, I think the solution for Scott is to fill out an IT
> ticket.

Agreed.  The guys that maintain the AD will need to make the change.
There are other hacks, depending on exactly how authentication is set
up on the machine, but maintaining hacks is almost always the Wrong
Thing?.


-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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