On 2012/08/07 04:40, Tom Horsley wrote:
So here's one that always leaves me wondering: The #1 original
admin advice that *ought* to be Cargo Cult except for the
fact that it actually works quite often: "reinstall the
program".
It is recommended far more often on Windows than on Linux,
but I see folks say it on Linux as well, and the totally
absurd thing is that it often works.
Why should it work? If a computer doesn't work well enough
to do a simple job like copy a few files off some install
media reliably, why on earth would you trust it to run
the (probably) much more complicated program you just
installed? In fact, if copying a few files onto the system
fails so often that reinstall is a standard practice, why
does anything ever work at all? It is a mystery to me :-).
Well, with Vista and 7 at least reinstall "as administrator"
is usually very good advice. This is more automatic using
tools like yum since that must be run as root. But installing
side packages may "appear" to work but the program won't run
correctly if not done as root (via sudo or whatever.) Repeating
precisely the same actions and expecting different results is
foolish, and getting different results is frightening.
{^_^}
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