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Interesting but two quibbles
Authored by: babbage on Oct 25, '02 06:51:34PM
  1. I have yet to hear a convincing argument in favor of enabling the root account on an OSX box [or for that matter on any other *nix where you have sudo available]. It is *far* better to issue commands that require escalated priviliges with the sudo command rather than mucking around with no safety net in a root shell. Sudo is smart enough to generate an audit log of everything you do, and while this can be attacked in various ways, it's a hell of a lot better than not having it at all. So, please please don't encourage anyone to enable root frivolously -- all the steps of this hint should be doable exactly the same way by just prefixing them all with sudo.
  2. There are a lot of annoying installers out there, but please be aware that you're getting into intimate juju when messing with hot-swapping of kernel extensions. The microkernel design of Mach/Darwin does make it possible to do this safely, but it's a pretty cutting edge thing for a system to do, and you could end up seeing problems with some software. This isn't to say that it can't be done safely (cf. also BeOS & the way it allowed you to restart the various sytem server processes, so you could change video & network settings on the fly without rebooting), but it really is a good habit to do a reboot after such system modifications. If you want to use this hack to avoid an immediate reboot, that's fine, but if you're just trying to show off your impressive uptime figures, get over it. It's probably safer to use this as a tactic for delaying reboots, not avoiding them. Even the OS of the Future needs to sleep once in a while :-)


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Re: Interesting but two quibbles
Authored by: thornrag on Feb 27, '04 11:47:02AM

It's only "cutting edge" to the Mac crowd. On many Unix and Linux systems, nothing short of an actual modification to the kernel itself -- a recompiled kernel binary -- requires a reboot.

Of course, it's true that a middle manager with an iBook doesn't need to maximize the uptime, but it does hurt to wipe away 100 days or more of uptime just because a cocky or sloppy installer didn't finish the job. The situation might be slightly elevated on a production server, in which case hopefully you have all your kernel modules installed before going online. But even if it's not...

There's just no reason to require a reboot for the installation of new software. Only incomplete installers and misguided developers make the mistake of requiring users to reboot. HP's printer drivers for the mac are the worst, quitting all your applications and then requiring a restart. There's nothing that it does that requires this. In fact it should be prohibited somehow that any one application could be allowed to quit all your other running applications. Why doesn't this scare the bejeezus out of anyone? How draconian is that? That's from the dark ages, people.

For the *real* cutting edge, we need to be screaming at developers who force us to put up with this, not baby hand-holding users who will reboot their computers "for good measure" anyway. It'll take time and pressure, but our Macs simply do not need to be rebooted for the sake of any installer.

And if there's no way around it, we need to be demanding better. If printer drivers don't work unless the printer is connected when the system starts up, that is a crappy HP printer, and we need to demand better.

Come on, people... the Mac's cutting edge is what liberates us from oppressive installers! End the cycle of blithe complacency!

I call on everyone who digs into this buried year-old thread to RISE UP!!!!



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