Years and Years and Years of experience..

[Kevin Buettner]

On Oct 5,  9:03pm, Shawn T. Rutledge wrote:

> Another example - at work last week the admins reformatted the
> hard drive on my Ultra5 and started over, because it needed some
> repartitioning anyway.  (Suns have this neat firmware 
> feature that allows them to install a complete filesystem
> via the network; no mucking around with boot disks.)  Afterwards
> I could no longer ftp into the system.  I scratched my head for
> a while, checked everything I could think of, and had to ask an
> admin for help (which is a little embarrassing, because I've been the 
> thorn in their sides many times for being control freaks, and espoused
> the viewpoint that a software engineer should have root on his
> own box, for crying out loud.)  The problem was that my shell is
> bash, and ftp only accepts connections for users whose shells are
> "blessed" as being OK, by having them listed in /etc/shells.  

Good example.

I ran into this problem a couple of years ago and it took me quite a
while to figure out what was wrong.  (I don't remember exactly how
long; maybe a couple of hours.)  Anyway, I've run into this problem
several times since and I now know immediately what to do.

I tend not to be disciplined enough to keep written notes.  (And if I
was, I wouldn't be able to find them.)  Sometimes when I run into
something like this, I'll write up a detailed email that I'll post to
a mailing list.  Usually these go to a company list, but I'll
sometimes post to a public list as well.  E.g, see:

http://lists.plug.phoenix.az.us/pipermail/plug-discuss/2000-September/005501.html

There'll be times that I'll run into something that kind of looks
familiar and I'll remember that I wrote an email on the matter at one
time and it's often quicker to go digging through my mail archives
that re-researching it all over again.

Kevin