* * * * *

                                   DreadHat

Now I remember what I hate about system administration—taking over an
existing setup. It's never how I would set up the system and there are always
gotchas hiding away in some dusty corner of the system.

It's been an interesting couple of days as I get up to speed on the four
systems I've been hired to run. The fact that they're running RedHat [1]
(three are 7.2, one is 9.0) didn't upset me that much.

Never mind the extraneous packages that have been installed (X? On a
server?), what has me upset is the overreliance on RPM (RedHat Package
Manager)s.

Perhaps I'm old school, but I prefer to download the tarballs and compile
from source. That way I know what I'm getting and patching is so much easier
when you have the source (plus not having to wait around for a “official”
patch from whatever vendor you use). Already I'm running into problems with
these systems. Mainly with an incomplete development system (you have X, but
skipped Flex?) and dependancy hell with RPMs (can't install foo because it
depends upon bar 1.7 but bar 2.1 is istalled, but it's not in the RPM
database, and doing a rpm -i --force foo.rpm fails … ).

Given a complete development system, I can live with RedHat, skipping the use
of RPMs entirely (I'm still creaking along with a few installations of RedHat
5.2 and I'm not counting on there being RPMs of Bind 9 [2] for RedHat 5.2)
but a partial development system?

Annoying, but something I can work around.

Sigh.

[1] http://www.redhat.com/
[2] http://www.isc.org/products/BIND/bind9.html

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