On Nov 9, 2006, at 2:09 PM, Jim Redman wrote:
Folks,
I have to say, of all the lists I subscribe to, the vocal members
of this list are the most arrogant and insulting. However, I
consider comments such as Luca Gibelli's, bandwidth wasting, "We
are happy to suffer this loss." and Dennis Peterson's "His specific
problem is he lacks the skill to install and manage the product"
reflect more about the person making the comment, rather than the
target.
You're forgetting one detail that probably was the most provoking,
though. He started right off saying he "cherishes his ignorance".
How many of our problems as sysadmins come from user ignorance? How
much worse is it when you have to deal with another peer's ignorance,
and worse yet, WILLFUL ignorance? "Hi, I'm hired to do a complicated
and skillful job as a sysadmin, but want to know nothing about how or
why this software stuff works...can you help me? By, like, doing it
for me?"
If he was asking for help or proposing a reform without expressly
saying the driving reason was because he wanted to know nothing about
how it worked or how to install it or even how to properly tune it to
keep from annoying fellow mail sysadmins on nearby networks, it
wouldn't have elicited such a venomous response from an open source
group. These people working on ClamAV aren't, to my knowledge, paid
to make the program or keep it up to date, let alone make the
installer and front-end interfaces the most polished. They are
programmers doing this in their spare time to try to make a usable
product for their peers.
And you're surprised that unpaid programmers and sysadmins having to
routinely deal with problems that are often linked to end-user
ignorance would get a little ticked when getting a question from
someone saying they're a sysadmin who wants to remain clueless? More
often than not the way to get respect among that little social club
is to try learning things and expanding your knowledge through your
questions, not chastising them because they're doing something that
forces you to learn something about why and how your system works.
I would also consider the prevalent attitude misplaced and wrong,
and before you berate me for knowing nothing, let me say this I've
been managing mail systems on Linux since the late 1.x releases and
build and support embedded Linux distros. If you're following the
logic here, that still doesn't prove that I know much, but at least
I have some background...
Personally, I didn't mean to say that you're someone who knows
*nothing* about Linux or Unix. I don't know what your specialty is.
My personal belief is that there are very few gurus who know all
there is to know about hardware and software
administration...sysadmins specialize or they tend to have
superficial knowledge of a wide array of topics. A mail admin may
know about spam filtering, viruses flying around the Internet,
Postfix vs. Qmail, etc., while knowing little about DDR RAM or the
next-gen processors slated for release from Intel. At the same time,
you shouldn't be willfully ignorant about the topics related to your
field and have no desire to learn more since you don't know when that
knowledge will be handy. Sysadmins supposedly carry on the spirit of
the original hackers, and the hallmark was curiosity and willingness
to learn new things.
Proclaiming a desire to be ignorant does not win brownie points among
those he was "asking for help".
Somewhere between my teenage years and now, I have enough
experience to realize that I don't know everything. I can't create
faster/better optimized programs using assembler than a high level
language, and I'm not the worlds most knowledgeable Linux security
expert. The many packages that make up Linux are better understood
by those who created and maintain them and these people are the
most qualified to produce secure configurations of these packages.
Even if I DID understand a package better than the maintainer, or
have a better grasp of security than the person producing
configuration, I would recognize that having more people look at
the configuration WILL improve the system. This is one of the
basic arguments of Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_3/raymond/
Which is fine...no one, I believe, was arguing against this idea.
They did seem to take offense to the attitude of "Hello fellow
sysadmins, can you improve this packager so I don't need to know
anything about it, just drop it in place and bingo everything works?"
I'll further encourage these efforts because, having done this for
a while, I realize that it _IS_ now possible for someone who knows
almost nothing about Linux administration to take a distro, install
it, update it using one of the package managers and have a secure,
if sub-optimal installation, taking the defaults at installation.
When I realize that this person might otherwise have put Windows on
the net and become another spam and virus spewing Bot I feel that
anything that can be done to make the standard distros easier to
use, and so to encourage their uptake, is good.
That is a user. End users do this. Sysadmins should not be ignorant
when running services...it's part of the "administration" in the job
title to imply they know something about what they're doing.
You do people no favor when you encourage a mail sysadmin to not know
what SMTP stands for. Maybe we should advocate that medicine be
simplified to the point where you need a heap of ignorance and a
grain of good will from others to make home surgery kits?
There's a reason sysadmins are supposed to be earning more money than
a go-fer in a company or a burger-flipper at a mcjob. They're
supposed to have more skills and are learning more to enhance those
skills. `
And yet, when you suggest that one of the advances that ClamAV
could make is to be in a position to help these people, the
responses represent an elitist (and mis-guided) attitude that
everyone should be a highly skill sysadmin more knowledgeable of
the ClamAV system.
No, just not encouraging people to remain ignorant. The more
ignorance you spread, the more support calls you generate. Unless
you're doing it on purpose, in which case I'd wonder if you're
purposely keeping people "stupid" to keep from losing a lucrative
base from which to take advantage of their dependence and ignorance
for your own gains.
There is also the possibility that if people knew the basics of what
they're doing it cuts down on the more frivolous support calls and
requests so people can focus on more important issues that could use
polishing and fixing.
So, now you have some more flamebait. I'm signing off, because,
for the vocal members of this list at least, Scott Adams seems to
have the right idea (http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/):
"Let me begin by saying I don’t debate with advocates. An advocate
says that everything is right about one position and everything is
wrong about the other side. You might as well debate with a doorknob."
"Pot, Kettle. Kettle, Pot."
-Bart_______________________________________________
http://lurker.clamav.net/list/clamav-users.html
