To SMIT or not to SMIT (Was: Re: objectrepository and odme)

[Bjorn Engsig]

In a number of articles, the ODM, it's editor odme, and SMIT are discussed, and
in article <4740 at awdprime.UUCP> jerry at heyman.austin.ibm.com (Jerry Heyman) says:
|
|When I said 'most' configuration could still be done in stanza files (and I 
|gave the example of inet.conf)  [ ... ].  If you use 
|SMIT and ODM for all your configuration information, then you should be ok.
|Some people might not want to have all their information in an ODM database,
|so we have given the option of starting some of the commands (again I'll use
|inetd) by telling it NOT to use ODM and to use the stanza files.
|
|A thing to note when using smit.  It always modifies the appropriate odm
|database, but doesn't update a stanza file that has the same information in
|it.  This is a shortcoming of the tool and is being addressed.
Yes, this is a shortcoming, in my opinion a somewhat different one, though;
being in the database world has taught my one very important thing: NEVER,
EVER keep redundant information, and I guess this is actually what confuses
people, and makes us uncertain weather to use SMIT or the other tools.  What
happens if I create a user by editing /etc/passwd, mkdir, chown, create
.profile, and run passwd?  What happens if I nfs mount a directory using
/etc/mount?  As these examples show, it is often hard for us to make sure
that all the sysadm information is consistent.  If your answer to this is,
'always use SMIT', then: How do I use SMIT to increase the maximum number of
processes per user?  (Done by 'chdev -l sys0 -a maxuproc=200')
-- 
Bjorn Engsig,         E-mail: bengsig at oracle.com, bengsig at oracle.nl
ORACLE Corporation    Path:   uunet!orcenl!bengsig

            "Stepping in others footsteps, doesn't bring you ahead"