Sunday, July 13, 2008

One Mean Little Linux Machine (and how lame is RHEL/CentOS)



I've been wanting to get one these Ultra Slim Form Factor Optiplexes for months, but I finally got my hands on one on Saturday in preparation for the upcoming classes I'll be teaching in a week. So I have a couple of these boxes 3.0 Ghz Core 2 Duos with 4 gigs. Not bad. Small (as you can see) and very quiet. Perfect for a classroom environment.

I would show a nice lshw output, but of course CentOS 5.2 is so lame you can't even pull it from the standard repos, but I guess I'll have to figure out this DAG bullshit. And I struggled for 2 hours yesterday getting the box usable in what would have taken me 10-15. And I'm still struggling.

This is because I work in RHEL/CentOS shop, and ITS laid down CentOS 5.2 for me. That's another thing I'm experiencing some "personal growth" in letting ITS do their job. Definitely a bit of an adjustment when you are used to owning the hardware, the OS, the apps, to let somebody else to the lower layer in the stack. Also much harder to hide in a small company, especially if your office is adjacent to the Director of IT.

It's much easier (and far more pleasant) to do the whole "shadow IT" in big companies, use personal equipment, break all the rules that I'm used to doing in big companies (usually because I was in a "security group" and the rules didn't really apply.) Oh well, what can you do.

1 comment:

Richard Bejtlich said...

And I thought I was the only one... I had to deploy Nfsen on a company "server on demand" a few months ago. It's a RHEL 4 box, IIRC. Turns out we have no supported way to get packages on this thing. Great. I end up compiling everything from source because it's easier than wrestling with unsupported package repositories. (I wasted several hours with this, including trying to get through our proxies.) Overall it was a frustrating experience that would have been much simpler if the box had been either Debian-based or FreeBSD.