New Sun-Managers Mailing List!

[William LeFebvre]

This is to announce the formation of another Sun-related mailing list.
This list has been formed specifically for those who manage Sun
workstations, thus the name "sun-managers".  I will be maintaining this
list, but the list will be unmoderated and undigested.  It is intended to
be a quick-turnaround list for system managers to use when they get in
over their heads with a given problem.

Although I do not have specific guidelines about what topics are
or are not acceptable for this list, I do have some ideas and examples.

Here are some topics that I would consider acceptable for sun-managers:
organization-wide UIDs, security issues, kernel panics and crashes, kernel
configuration files, accounting issues, configuring and using YP
databases, setting up the standard files in /etc, problems with hardware
installation, bugs in the kernel, bugs in the *standard* set of
distributed software (the standard commands and libraries).

Here are some topics that I feel would not be appropriate:  locating a
software package that does X (unless X is a system management task),
generic programming questions, detailed questions about how network
protocols work, "Fortran 300 times faster than C for computing cosine",
"Severe eyestrain", problems with ghostscript or gnuemacs or gnuchess or
gnuanythingelse.

Here are topics that are borderline:  bugs in the Fortran compiler,
troubleshooting network communication problems, what hardware is the best
to buy.  These are issues that system managers must sometimes deal with,
but in each case there is a possibly better forum for the discussion.
There is a real fuzzy border between sun-managers and sun-nets.  Hopefully
we can just deal with these issues as they come up.

HOW TO SIGN UP:  My hope is that this list will not be as large as
Sun-Spots.  My intent is that only one or two people from each local
"cluster" of Suns will be on the list---that is, only those people
directly involved with Sun management.  But I'm not going to enforce any
such guidelines.  If you want to be on this list, then mail a request to
the address "sun-managers-request at rice.edu".  Postings should be mailed to
"sun-managers at rice.edu", but I would not recommend mailing any postings in
until people have had a chance to "join up" (give it about a week after
you read this).

I currently have no plans to feed a Usenet group with this list.  But if I
get the traffic that I expect to get, then it shoud be pretty easy to
start another group (perhaps "comp.sys.sun.managers") if there is
interest.  I have no plans to archive the messages, especially since they
will not be sent in a digest.

		William LeFebvre
		<phil at rice.edu>