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From: Bill Pechter <pechter_at_monmouth.com>
Date: Mon Jan 11 05:36:43 1999

> It was thus said that the Great Huw Davies once stated:
> >
> > At 06:43 PM 09-01-99 +1030, Computer Room Internet Cafe wrote:
> >
> > >Ok, as a (currently) AIX deprived person, might I ask WTH is SMIT please?
> >
> > SMIT = System Management Integration Tool
> >
> > Basically a menu based system to do Unix sysadmin type things without
> > editing the usual Unix files.
>
> The only Unix-like system around anymore that allows you to hand edit all
> the files is Linux. BSD? Forget editing the password file directly---you
> have to use some abomination called `vipw' for that. I'm not sure if there
> are any other files with special editing commands; I dropped BSD (and BSD
> derived systems) ASAP (can't stand BSD). HP-UX also required special
> commands to edit files (although it has SAM, similar to SMIT).


There's some misinformation on admin here.

vipw an abomination. Nah. It just locks the password file so no one else
can change it while you do the edit and pulls the password file info
and shadow info from the password hashed database (for faster access)
into the flat text file you can edit.

vipw also will use whatever your editor variable is, not just vi.

Boy... that's nothing new. vipw's been around for over 10 years now
and it existed in many SysV varients as well as Berkeley Unix systems.

With straight flat password files, two sysadmins can both make changes
at the same time and the last one to write the file is the person
who's changes take effect. Not too predictable on a large site.

I like the SysV init and multiple runstates and the SVR4
rc.d style rc scripts -- most of the rest is an overly complex kludge
with too much old code still in place. SysV still would have
14 character file limits and the lousy S5fs if it wasn't for BSD.

You can see what I'm running here...
uname -a FreeBSD pechter.ddns.org 3.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 3.0-CUR i386 i386

Bill
Received on Mon Jan 11 1999 - 05:36:43 GMT