An Open Letter to the SA-talk forumHello Logan,
Mind if I chime in for a moment? :)
> Regarding some of the other comments that have been made, some of you
> have said that SA is not hard to install, taking no more than an hour or
> two to download, install, configure and begin using. That is consistent
> with the 10 times longer number I used, because the other installation
> and configuration times were all around 5-10 minutes. You have said that
> an experienced Linux administrator doesn't find SA difficult to install
> or configure, ...
Is SA hard to install? Not harder than any other program based on Perl. Perl
is the underlying engine, which, in and by itself, has nothing to do with
SA. It is good to keep that in mind; because, to the untrained eye, the
areas may seem blurred, where everything more-or-less belongs to the same
installation procedure. But that is not the case.
So, your question must, implicitly, be preceded by this one: is Perl hard to
install? Or, more to the point, is it hard to install a Perl program? That
depends. On what Perl version resides on the OS at the time, to name one. If
it be Perl version 5.005_03, for instance, then you will find SA
particularly cumbersome to install, and probably will not install at all
even, without a major effort by the admin, trying to get the most important
packages up-to-date. You may have a later version of Perl, say, version 5.6;
but you might, for example, not have the Time:HiRes package installed. Or
DB_File may be absent from your installation. Things like that. And getting
those things will cause you to run the extra mile. But keep bearing in mind,
that still none of this has anything to do with SA. These are all issues
that come with the installation of pretty much every Perl program: they are
inherent to Perl itself, not to SA.
So, is SA hard to install? You will hopefully now see that this question, on
its own, is somewhat meaningless. If an administrator has Perl neatly kept
up-to-date, and has most prerequisite packages already installed (because of
previous installation procedures for other programs, for instance), then it
will likely be a breeze. If not, he may run into some trouble, and be
tempted to blame SA. But he would be amiss in doing so; as would the
journalist writing about it. :)
I give you on a piece of paper, that nine out of ten times,
compilation/installation errors are caused by a problem in the Perl
distribution; either missing, conflicting, or outdated packages, or
something else. But hardly ever will SA itself be at fault. And even if
there seems to be something rotten in the state of the SA distro, then still
withholding judgment is prudent. Because distributions are dependent on the
OS, and the people who prepare those distributions. On Linux you have your
RPM repository; and on FreeBSD, which I use, you have your ports collection,
where usually a single individual, not associated with the original authors,
takes it upon himself to create a suitable, ported version. Though rare, he
may goof, and have a typo in a directory or something. And still we cannot
blame SA for that.
> ... and that additional functionality such as user-accessible
> white lists can be added, either through additional open source software
> or by writing scripts or programming to extend the functionality of SA.
> That's true, but not really relevant, unless there is a distribution
> that contains all of those features.
I daresay, most admins are fairly proficient in Perl. So, precisely because
SA is written in Perl, it is easy to change/extend. It seems kinda unfair to
then turn this easy-extendibility around, and portray it as a weakness, or
irrelevancy, because these extensions do not come with the standard
distribution! Because with a lot of commercial software, and tenfold so on
Windoze machines, you will find that you cannot change anything at all. Is,
conversely, such an unalterable program then a pre? I think not.
I eagerly await your new article.
- Mark
System Administrator Asarian-host.org
---
"If you were supposed to understand it,
we wouldn't call it code." - FedEx
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