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Life in the Trenches: a Sysadmin Speaks
Anonymous Coward writes "A senior systems administrator at a big ISP in Australia offers
a no-nonsense view about his line of work, the pros and the cons, ths ups and the downs."
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[...]people may recall that Craig recently got in to a nasty flame war with Dan Bernstein
/ 20 02-November/000885.html
anyone who recognises the name Dan Bernstein will realise that this is hardly surprising. the guy is a know-it-all jerk with a severe inferiority complex, even the slightest comment about his software that could be interpreted in a less than glowingly positive fashion will result in lengthy and boring flamewar from him. that's why i've killfiled bernstein, i have no interest in reading anything that he has to say. i have no interest in running his software, either. the hassle and annoyance of integrating bernstein-ware into a working system far outweighs any of the advantages.
To make a long story short (and the flame war got ugly), Craig feels that a DNS server needs to support the legacy BIND [...]
yes, that cuts a long story very short. and conveniently throws away almost the entirety of my reasons for deciding that djbdns was worthless rubbish.
lack of backwards compatibility with bind was only one of the many reasons why djbdns sucks - lack of backwards compatibility is a common flaw with all of bernstein's crapware. as is his brain-damaged configuration style and his obsessive Not Invented Here syndrome that requires him to manically reinvent things that don't particularly need re-inventing.
Now, the only specific that Craig went in to when pointing out that he did not like my DNS server is that fact that, like Dan's TinyDNS, MaraDNS has no support for BIND's zone file format.
actually, that's not true. i didn't give ANY specific reasons as to why i think maradns is poorly written.
the reason why i think that is because of bone-headed comments you made in
http://www.swelltech.com/pipermail/mara-archive
in particular your excuse for not doing any signal handling: "I consider signal handling a security risk. MaraDNS responds to a HUP signal by terminating; one has to restart MaraDNS to reload the configuration files."
statements like these do not inspire confidence in your ability to write secure code. before i discovered that little gem, i was recommending maradns to people who wanted an alternative to bind for non-authoritative name servers. after reading it, i can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone.
I am not saying that BIND style zone file support is unimportant. However, I think Craig should be a little more courtious in requesting this feature than badmouthing MaraDNS on the Debian ISP mailing list.
1. when did i ever request this feature?
2. if i had wanted to make more than a passing comment about maradns, i would have emailed you directly.
3. if saying "maradns isn't particularly good software, but a) it's GPL, b) it doesn't have djb's weird configuration style and c) it's adequate for the task i want to use it for." qualifies as "badmouthing" then you really ought to acquire a thicker skin.