May 8th, 2008
An idea about teaching Linux to the MCSE community
Frequent contributor Roger Ramjet has a bit of a bee in his bonnet about path and naming standardization across a multi-vendor distributed Unix architecture. If I understand him correctly, he believes that it’s both possible and sensible to build what amounts to a standardization harness - a set of scripts which, when run on the target environment, create a standardized working environment for users and sysadmins alike.
On a personal basis I do something similar: a script that writes a .cshrc file which then sets up aliases and pathing to let me use the same commands in the same way across Unix variants and customer set-ups. Thus “% o_logs” does a cd to the right place no matter which Unix variant the customer has or where some other guy decided to put them.
This approach would work, I think, for the narrow purpose of addressing a wide range of MCSE concerns about learning to use Linux because it could give them what they need: a completely standardized, if somewhat minimal, interface to many different Linux releases.
Mine is quite primitive - a collection of files requiring some manual intervention to verify when first used - but it’s easy to see how the Configure/Make combination could be used to build everything from .bashrc files to gnome configurations. Equally, it wouldn’t be a big deal for the people putting out new releases to provide customized versions of the files -thereby creating a kind of standardized high level interface layer aimed at helping MCSEs overcome their fear of Linux variability.
Paul Murphy (a pseudonym) is an IT consultant specializing in Unix and related technologies. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 05/08/08
