[Discuss] tcsh, AD, and RHEL 5.6

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On 09/07/2012 07:18 PM, Derek Martin wrote:
> 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...
>
I have not used a commercial Unix system for a while, but we used to
ship a number of different Bourne Shells because of legacy scripts. And,
true, the POSIX Shell is very compatible with BASH, and it is also
fairly simple to install BASH on virtually any commercial Unix system,
but the issue is that the system maintainer may not want to do that. So
the issue is more political than anything else.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
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