Interesting, actually, when you break out those zones to allow them to update themselves they become delegated NS records. What do the RFCs say about underscores in domains? (since domains are what you delegate with NS records.)
I don't know your particular situation, but it may well be that your "brain-dead" "paranoid" Unix sysadmin is in fact doing the best possible thing for you. You know, making sure that your application will run out there in the real world? where every competent sysadmin is running his web server with minimum privelege, ensuring that form content is not re-evaluated as executable, etc. Network-accessible code should be developed to suit the most paranoid person available, to develop otherwise is to develop in the manner of Microsoft. It's often easier to just set yourself as root and trust that you are the ultimate coder, but that doesn't make it right.
Re:Microsoft should be sued
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What if Mr. Schmoe wants to use his spiffy MS web authoring tool, Frontpage? or Visual Interdev? On win9x they'll both try to install the PWS. What do they do on NT/2k?
IIRC, the various dialogs are full of "without this feature, you will not get the full functionality..." messages, and NOT full of "You are installing an Internet Service, with all the responsibility that this implies" messages.
How about "I have a fleet of trucks made by Ford, and 90% of roads only allow Ford trucks, So switching to Chevy is difficult. You can get to most places using Multi-brand roads, but most of my truck drivers are too stupid to learn these (possibly shorter) alternate routes."
In this model, Ford has decided to lock the tires onto the wheels of all my new trucks. In order to change the tires, my motor pool has to go to the truck, read the serial number off the inside rim, Call for Ford's crack roadside service (two guys both named Earl who always take 3 days to arrive), Earl and Earl only bring the one key(to prevent car-jacking presumably). The Earls unlock the tire, my mechanic changes the tire, the Earls re-lock the tire with a new key, and write down the new key and the new tire's serial numbers on yellow post-its.
I know, I know, It's my fault for buying Ford.
Also note that I even had to buy the tire.
This is going to totally hose those of us doing drive imaging to hundreds of machines.
Only those who have somehow failed to notice the key feature of Linux and the BSD's is their Open Source nature. Or those who are only into the open Unices because they have a blind passion for anything not-MS.
This is the first time a mass market vendor has released a Linux/BSD compatible OS.
I guess it depends on your definition of 'mass-market vendor' Sun,HP,IBM have all released OS's that are AS compatible with Linux as MacOSX. Heck HP and IBM ship with Linux, and RedHat distributes it for x86 and sparc.
We should also not forget Linuxppc and Yellowdog, who ship Linux ITSELF for the same hardware that OSX runs on.
Sure the interface and many of the details are different but it opens the way for cross-ports. If a developer makes something for one OS they can support the other fairly easily.
Um. As long as the application in question doesn't have more than a text interface, and is willing to get info from NetInfoD instead of the usual places, that's true. For applications going from open Unices to OSX, that is. OSX applications will all be built with the totally proprietary gui stuff, which will be difficult to backport.
As a victim of MacOSX Server, I've got to say that so far Apple has a long way to go with this. As a competent Linux user, this is my impression:
A basically UNIX-like OS.
All the normal config files (/etc/passwd, etc/hosts, resolv.conf) are there, but not used by the OS. Instead it uses this NetInfoD thingy, that's kind of like NIS, except undocumented and proprietary to Next and Apple.
There are few listserves, mostly staffed by avid MacOS9 users lost at sea at the command line. Eager to chat about Apple corp's greatness, but basically clueless about how OSX works. No helpful list like redhat-list with lots of knowledgeable senior folks.
No LDP.
A roughly 14 page "Getting Started" manual that walks you through an install procedure that has all the advantages and disadvantages of a 'single-click install'(You get choices like "do you want to be a network server?" not "Which services do you want to install/start?")
An Unix-like OS that prefers to use MacOS filesystems, but can't back them up from the command line! (It can tar up the data, but misses HFS+-specific data, like file type and creator)
A Gui backup tool that only backs up and restores files it has in its database, so it's useless for disaster recovery.(And can't back up to remote servers).
An AppleshareIP implementation that slowly gets slower and slower, and eats itself on about one in ten clean restarts, forcing a full OS reinstall.
A non-X gui, so no remoting windows, but yet another interface to learn the quirks of.
Almost No Documentation.
In all fairness, Apple is focusing on the client product, but still OSX Server was a joke. After 6 months of babying it along, we gave up and now we're using linux+netatalk to do the same thing on the same hardware. At zero software cost.
Enough Whining. I'm going home now.
How hybrid does the cd actually have to be? All three supported platforms (Win32,MacOS,and Linux) can read the same CD format. Why not just do a windows-style cd with sub-directories for each OS. Put the installer in each sub, and stash the game data in a fourth dir.
You may have to pick which OS to support Autorun on (Do Macs do this? If so, does it depend on HFS?), but adding two clicks to descend a directory and run setup.exe/setup.sh/Quake Installer isn't too much of a stretch, is it?
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Interesting, actually, when you break out those zones to allow them to update themselves they become delegated NS records. What do the RFCs say about underscores in domains? (since domains are what you delegate with NS records.)
I don't know your particular situation, but it may well be that your "brain-dead" "paranoid" Unix sysadmin is in fact doing the best possible thing for you. You know, making sure that your application will run out there in the real world? where every competent sysadmin is running his web server with minimum privelege, ensuring that form content is not re-evaluated as executable, etc. Network-accessible code should be developed to suit the most paranoid person available, to develop otherwise is to develop in the manner of Microsoft. It's often easier to just set yourself as root and trust that you are the ultimate coder, but that doesn't make it right.
What if Mr. Schmoe wants to use his spiffy MS web authoring tool, Frontpage? or Visual Interdev? On win9x they'll both try to install the PWS. What do they do on NT/2k?
IIRC, the various dialogs are full of "without this feature, you will not get the full functionality..." messages, and NOT full of "You are installing an Internet Service, with all the responsibility that this implies" messages.
How about "I have a fleet of trucks made by Ford, and 90% of roads only allow Ford trucks, So switching to Chevy is difficult. You can get to most places using Multi-brand roads, but most of my truck drivers are too stupid to learn these (possibly shorter) alternate routes."
In this model, Ford has decided to lock the tires onto the wheels of all my new trucks. In order to change the tires, my motor pool has to go to the truck, read the serial number off the inside rim, Call for Ford's crack roadside service (two guys both named Earl who always take 3 days to arrive), Earl and Earl only bring the one key(to prevent car-jacking presumably). The Earls unlock the tire, my mechanic changes the tire, the Earls re-lock the tire with a new key, and write down the new key and the new tire's serial numbers on yellow post-its.
I know, I know, It's my fault for buying Ford.
Also note that I even had to buy the tire.
This is going to totally hose those of us doing drive imaging to hundreds of machines.
- A basically UNIX-like OS.
- All the normal config files (/etc/passwd, etc/hosts, resolv.conf) are there, but not used by the OS. Instead it uses this NetInfoD thingy, that's kind of like NIS, except undocumented and proprietary to Next and Apple.
- There are few listserves, mostly staffed by avid MacOS9 users lost at sea at the command line. Eager to chat about Apple corp's greatness, but basically clueless about how OSX works. No helpful list like redhat-list with lots of knowledgeable senior folks.
- No LDP.
- A roughly 14 page "Getting Started" manual that walks you through an install procedure that has all the advantages and disadvantages of a 'single-click install'(You get choices like "do you want to be a network server?" not "Which services do you want to install/start?")
- An Unix-like OS that prefers to use MacOS filesystems, but can't back them up from the command line! (It can tar up the data, but misses HFS+-specific data, like file type and creator)
- A Gui backup tool that only backs up and restores files it has in its database, so it's useless for disaster recovery.(And can't back up to remote servers).
- An AppleshareIP implementation that slowly gets slower and slower, and eats itself on about one in ten clean restarts, forcing a full OS reinstall.
- A non-X gui, so no remoting windows, but yet another interface to learn the quirks of.
- Almost No Documentation.
In all fairness, Apple is focusing on the client product, but still OSX Server was a joke. After 6 months of babying it along, we gave up and now we're using linux+netatalk to do the same thing on the same hardware. At zero software cost. Enough Whining. I'm going home now.How hybrid does the cd actually have to be? All three supported platforms (Win32,MacOS,and Linux) can read the same CD format. Why not just do a windows-style cd with sub-directories for each OS. Put the installer in each sub, and stash the game data in a fourth dir.
You may have to pick which OS to support Autorun on (Do Macs do this? If so, does it depend on HFS?), but adding two clicks to descend a directory and run setup.exe/setup.sh/Quake Installer isn't too much of a stretch, is it?