rc.news: checking whether we run as the news user

[Noel Butler]

On 20/10/2014 20:39, Julien ÉLIE wrote:

> How sys admins install packages?
> I would expect that they use the packages provided with the 
> distribution they are running.

Then your assumption would only be right some of the time, most people I 
know don't use distro packages on key daemons, remember distros try to 
cater for the majority, so they will not contain every requirement, and 
they will contain bloat which introduces more possible points of 
failure, and/or reduces security.


Not to mention, not all distros carry things like inn, Slackware dropped 
it some years ago, I forget the reasoning, but it was valid, maybe a 
huge bug and project seemed DOA at the time, not sure now.



> I am a bit curious about how "most sys admins" install software. As you 
> speak about Apache, sendmail, postfix, dovecot, pureftpd, bind, etc., 
> do "most sys admins" install these software from source?
> It is not very efficient as far as time management is concerned...

As above (it also takes about 15 mins at most these days to build 
anything, even the kernel ( yes a great deal of sys admins even do this) 
but the one exception I find is debian users, they are either too scared 
or clueless to build software, or have been bitten by debians pkg 
management  andhave had many lost sleep hours trying to fix their debpkg 
systems that break, and cry like little so'n so's everytime you want to 
remove a pkg, it wants to take out half the installed pkgs on the system 
with it breaking things. Not to mention  distros like debian and redhat 
often in new releases, contain ancient version of software. Slackware 
and Gentoo are pretty good at being modern and not hacking things to 
bits, but even they cant cater for all.