ten billion butterfly sneezes

Well, my sed woes are over, and I’m not going crazy, at least because of that. As I detailed yesterday, I had a seemingly incorrect script, that apparently though unaccountably, did the right thing.

After further review, I discovered the application being packaged rewrites the file upon startup and shutdown. Apparently, the inputs to this rewrite process are obtained from files that were successfully created and converted during the Solaris pkgadd. Bottom line is, I need not have fiddled with the offending file at all. This is a hazard of 3rd party applications, when one knows little of their internal workings. The instinct, mine at least, is to convert every file that has a hostname, IP address, etc., that is different from the system on which you are currently installing the package.

I wish that vendors would supply a more transparent interface to their install/configuration process, without surrounding it with their (usually GUI) interface. I know the suits like GUIs, but they are rarely responsible for installing stuff on bunches of machines at once. And don’t even mention the “silent install” options some vendors offer. By using those, one loses the ability of the Solaris pkginfo command, or the Linux rpm -qa command to determine at one fell swoop what exactly is installed on a system. My mantra is if native OS tools are good enough to install the OS, they’re also good enough to install any applications the system needs.

Sometimes being old school is rough, but in this case worth it.

-k-