[olug] is it just me?

[Dave Hull]

Quoting Brian Roberson <roberson at olug.org>:

> I would assume you hand-editted /etc/apache/some/file that probably
> told you at the top of the file to not hand-edit this file ; yet to
> edit /etc/sysconfig/apache instead

I started with /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and creating
/etc/apache2/mod_spelling.conf. I'm no super Apache admin, but I've done this
enough times on other systems to know what I was doing.

Except that on SuSE every time apache restarts it builds a new config 
file based
on what's in /etc/sysconfig/apache2. Once I caught on to that fact, I 
tried hand
editing /etc/sysconfig/apache2. Still no joy.

Dug through Yast, pointing and clicking like a primitive man pointing and
grunting and voila! it started working. Went back and looked at the changes to
/etc/sysconfig/apache2, /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and
/etc/apache2/mod_spelling.conf and could see no differences between what Yast
had done and what I'd been trying to do manually. I probably just couldn't
recognize the difference, surely there was one, computers don't lie.

I don't want to get into a war over what is largely a matter of personal
preference. It's probably just that I'm an old CLI fan. I'd rather do it
manually that monkey through a bunch of menus. I've been on systems 
before that
had screwed up termcap entries where even curses based apps wouldn't run. In
times like that, it's nice to be able to get around using ed.

Here's another minor annoyance with Yast, try configuring automatic online
updates that run more than once a day. You can't do it via Yast, but 
you can do
it manually.

Try doing something complicated with IPTables via Yast. Or simply compare the
IPTables configuration on SuSE with RHEL. And tell me which one you'd rather
have to maintain.

-- 
Dave Hull
http://insipid.com