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Jerry Feldman wrote in a message to Mike Bilow: JF> One Debian question. Is there a tools analogous to the Red Hat JF> Control Panel. Not to my knowledge, but something like that could be available. JF> While I generally do most of the system admin things by hand, JF> such as host names, ip address, adding something to multiple JF> run levels is a bit of a pain by hand. For example, I needed JF> to add NFS to my Alpha since I now need to have Linux on my JF> Intel box. The procedure was to rm the Knnnfs and Knnnfsfs JF> links in run levels 2-5 and add Snn links. While the procedure JF> was easy, I messed them up (ln -s ../inetd/nfs S20nfs and ln JF> -s ../inet.d/nfs S99nfsfs). With the run level editor, this is JF> not as error prone. You can see that in the first entry I left JF> out the dot and the second, I linked to the wrong script. JF> System admin tools to not preemt the old way, but they can JF> prevent dumb errors which can be difficult to track down. Debian packages can vary in configuration quality. Each package can have a configuration tool of its own, usually shell or Perl scripts, and this is run by the package manager. It can also be invoked manually with command line switches on "dpkg." However, it is up to each package to handle these kinds of installation issues, creating links, and so forth. Only the package can be expected to know the names of its own binaries, for example. There are a number of configuration issues which are just too advanced for automated tools to perform without a lot of effort. For example, creating virtual addresses on a multihomed network interface, usually motivated by a need to do virtual web hosting with Apache, is hard to do without rebooting. JF> Purists would say, if you are going to do system admin, you JF> should know what you are doing, but the addition of these tools JF> tend to make Linux easier to install and maintain, so that more JF> non- Unix people can use it more effectively. The problem is that there is an inherent trade-off, especially with something as system-specific as run levels. Technically, administrators can define the run levels with any semantics they choose, but the distribution has certain defaults and these tend to be the same across all distributions. If packages can modify the semantics of system run levels, then it forces the administrator to adhere to the official definitions. Debian is not quite as rigid in this respect as Red Hat, but they both have to be pretty rigid in order to avoid breaking major packages such as X/Windows. -- Mike *** Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" to discuss-request at blu.org