Comment by grepfru_it | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grepfru_it | Hacker News Reader

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Oh wow old war wounds from teenage days opened up.

My friend kept locking himself out of root and would be forced to single user the system to recover. This was difficult for many reasons, including remote hands costing up to and including $50 per call. I decided to look into why su would only work with root. Found a very simple check that I thought was unreasonable. Made my first patch and proudly posted to the FreeBSD mailing list thinking I was going to change the world. Man, instead I come back to everyone chewing me a new one, calling my friend too dumb to use FreeBSD, and other things that was not rooted in reality. I didn’t even try to defend my patch, I had spent so much time evangelizing FreeBSD up to that point that it really made me question my support of the project.

Anyway fast forward like 5 years, I was telling the story to coworkers when I decided to look up the su source. shocked-pikachu someone took my patch and applied it (without attribution). I have since moved on from FreeBSD entirely and my open sourced works have never been so negatively picked apart again ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You still hold the copyright to your patch, and the governance of FreeBSD is so much better now. I know a former FreeBSD core team member who I'm sure would love to see you get finally credit for your work :)

I'd be more than happy to put you in touch - email address in my profile if you're interested.

FreeBSD does seem better directed than it used to be, but if you follow the handbook it still recommends setting up computers like individual special snowflakes instead of properly managed cattle.

Like, if your installation has useful services running on it, it should not also have a customized kernel and it probably shouldn't have a C compiler installed at all. What it should have is backups and a way to stage/test/revert config changes instead of just making them on prod. It… does not do this.

IME if you bring this up you'll just get a hundred complaints from people saying "I built a system to do this out of poudriere and duct tape so it's fine". I guess because the people who know about declarative programming all use Docker.

> if you follow the handbook it still recommends setting up computers like individual special snowflakes instead of properly managed cattle.

Which is a perfectly legitimate opinion to hold. "Cattle, not pets" is an opinion about best practices, not a religious dogma where those who don't agree must be cast out of the community.

Fair, but my experience was that automating FreeBSD installs is somewhere between tedious and impossible. And that was a big part in me moving on after so many years.

  not a religious dogma where those who don't agree must be cast out of the community

That's a fair assessment save for the fact that FreeBSD's been an extremely opinionated project since its inception.

That would be how Linux works, but BSDs are a centralized development model where you actually do have to leave if you disagree with the project direction. That and given limited resources, you obviously have to focus them to get anything done.

Besides that, I'd say the current approach is just wrong because it's obsolete. FreeBSD sells itself as a "server/embedded OS", but the assumptions are those of basically someone who owns a single computer at home and makes random sysctl tweaks to because they read on a mailing list it was faster. Which is the kind of person who's an OS developer or a small-business/academic sysadmin - basically someone who loves being on the computer in the first place and wants an excuse to spend more time on it.

But they should've realized that was obsolete by the time Google released the SRE book (which has a chapter about how you should never make manual edits), and certainly by the time virtualization and cloud hosting became common.

Of course, many people still do think it's fun to own a computer with a silly name and make random sysctl tweaks to it, so they're not going to like me telling them it should be boring and impossible to do. At least there's Docker and Nix though.

Hey thanks! I hold copyright like a stack overflow post owner holds their copyright. In reality, the change was maybe 4 bytes, it got wrapped into a “refactoring” commit and tada no need to reference the OG author. I played the same games back then too, so I ain’t even mad.

I will still reach out because BSD dev was a small community back then and we have probably crossed paths!

I noticed something that looked like inconsistent behaviour with the arch installer, and I wanted to learn why it looked like that to me. I asked in the forums a bunch of questions to understand the process better, with the aim to improve the installation guide for everyone else after me.

I was told I should just ignore the error messages I was seeing. When I kept asking, some of the most active members started insulting and ridiculing me. Then others started joining in.

The only thing I had in mind was to improve the guide for other people new to arch, that came after me. Instead, I was only insulted and ridiculed. I uninstalled Arch and never did anything with it again. The toxicity of that community still makes me angry today.

Do I understand correctly that su is to switch user, and that your patch makes it work with the target user's credentials rather than necessarily root?

I was confused while reading because I nearly only ever use su to switch to the superuser account and obviously to get root permissions you should be root or else it's a security issue. Looking up what su does on FreeBSD, I was reminded that it can switch to any user. I've actually used that before. You made that? :o

God that is the absolute worst. Those type of examples make my blood boil. Unfortunately, it happens all too often in life, especially in business.

Just wow

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