Cargo Cult sysadmining

Ian Malone ibmalone at gmail.com
Mon Aug 6 20:40:41 UTC 2012


On 6 August 2012 21:06, Joe Zeff <joe at zeff.us> wrote:

>
> It looks like I may have created a new use of Cargo Cult, based on Cargo
> Cult Programming.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming,
> http://foldoc.org/cargo+cult)  My thought was that disabling SELinux as a
> first step in troubleshooting any and every problem, even when there's no
> evidence that it's involved was equivalent to natives in New Guinea creating
> mockups of landing strips after WWII thinking that planes filled with cargo
> would land there.  Most of your suggestions, although bad ideas in and of
> themselves, don't have this (to me) important quality: IMO, to be considered
> cargo cult sysadminning, the practice must either have nothing to do with
> the problem it's intended to fix (Disabling your firewall because sshd
> doesn't start.) or is no longer relevant, such as most instances of
> reflexive disabling of SELinux. YMMV, and probably does, but I did think
> that I should put my original meaning for the term on the record.
>

Well, the thing is that SELinux often has effects that aren't
particularly obvious. After upgrading to F15 I found I couldn't log in
without disabling SELinux. At that point you can either try and fix
the problem or ignore it and carry on with SELinux disabled forever,
in doing the latter you haven't understood what's wrong or what other
problems might be involved.

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk


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