[news.sysadmin] About being pissed off

roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (12/05/88)

fox@marlow.uucp (Paul Fox) writes:
> it p**ses me off because the news software is not bug free.

	And it pisses me off when people bitch and moan about free software.
The news software may not be bug free, but it is cost free.  Sometimes you
get what you pay for.  In that case, you get much more than you pay for.  I
can think of several pieces of software for which I've paid significant sums
of money that had many more bugs than bnews 2.11.14 does.

	Hey, if you you don't like the way the current news software works,
you have several choices.  You could write your own.  Several people have
done this already.  You could fix the bugs that bother you (that's why you
get source).  Or you could just decide it's not worth the effort and stop
getting news.  But please don't complain about the quality of the software
and expect people to fix it for you.
-- 
Roy Smith, System Administrator
Public Health Research Institute
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net
"The connector is the network"

fox@marlow.uucp (Paul Fox) (12/14/88)

In article <3623@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes:
>
>fox@marlow.uucp (Paul Fox) writes:
>> it p**ses me off because the news software is not bug free.
>
>	And it pisses me off when people bitch and moan about free software.

Why can't you people understand plain English. The thing that
annoys me is the folks in the outside world poking their noses
into my system, and not only doing this, but incidentally causing my
system to bomb out.

I appreciate the quality of the news software, I think it is a
commendable piece of work -- I am not knocking it.

Out of the many months of reading just about every group I have
never seen anyone make the same complaint...

I have tried to nail down these bugs, and as yet still havent managed
to find the problem. What is worse is that every time I run news
under the debugger or whatever, I have to feed it a raw file from uucp.
(The X. and D. files). When the thing dies the only recourse
is to delete these files and all the lock files lying around. I
still dont know which files it is having problems with.

If i knew what the problem is I could fix it. Unfortunately, the
problem only occurs when people from outside send me control messages
and I STILL DONT KNOW WHICH BL**DY CONTROL MESSAGES IT IS WHICH CAUSE
THIS. This is what really p**ses me off.

There have been many megabytes of news postings on the subjects of the
worm. I thing the bugs in sendmail/fingerd are nothing compared to news.
Again, I respect the news software but there are too many holes in it
for any security conscious person to trust using it.

I am not particularly security conscious, but my company is. How
can I convince them that news is a good thing after the worm
incident, and every time I go on holiday I have people blaspheming
MY name because the system ran out of swap space.


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