238 System Administration
When somebody running on an HP tries to check out a file, it crashes
the machine. Panic, halt, flaming death, reboot. Of course, that’s only
on the HP machine where the RCS configuration was run. If you do a
check out from the newer HP machine everything works just fine. So
we look at the results of the configuration script, see that it’s using
mmap, hit ourselves in the head, edit the configuration script to not
even think about using mmap, and try again. Did I mention that the
configuration script takes maybe 15 minutes to run? And that it is
rerun every time you change anything, including the Makefile? And
that you have to change the Makefile to build a version of RCS that
you can test? And that I have real work to do? Compile, test, edit,
compile, install, back to work.A couple of days later there is another flurry of RCS problems.
Remember those shell scripts that try to make RCS more usable? It
turns out there are multiple copies of them, too, and of course I only
fixed one copy. Hack, hack, and back to work.Finally, one person can’t use the scripts at all. Things work for other
people, but not him. Why? It turns out that unlike the rest of us, he is
attempting to use Sun’s cmdtool. cmdtool has a wonderful-wonder-
ful-oh-so-compatible feature: it doesn’t set $LOGNAME. In fact it
seems to go out of its way to unset it. And, of course, the scripts use
$LOGNAME. Not $USER (which doesn’t work on the HPs); not
“who am i | awk '{print $1}' | sed ‘s/*\\!//”’ or some such hideous
command. So the scripts get hacked again to use the elegant syntax
“${LOGNAME:-$USER},” and I get back to work.It’s been 24 hours since I heard an RCS bug report. I have my fingers
crossed.Maintaining Mail Services
Sendmail, the most popular Unix mailer, is exceedingly complex. It
doesn’t need to be this way, of course (see the mailer chapter). Not only
does the complexity of sendmail ensure employment for sysadmins, it
ensures employment for trainers of sysadmins and keeps your sysadmin
away from the job. Just look at Figure 3, which is a real advertisement from
the net.Such courses would be less necessary if there was only one Unix (the
course covers four different Unix flavors), or if Unix were properly docu-