Sappy, but…
Yeah, this is one of those sappy posts. But I like to think it’s worth the few minutes of my time to write it, and it’s something I’ve really noticed and I’d like to share my appreciation.
I’ve made it past my first 90 days at Red Hat and I sure am glad I made the transition. You get wrapped up in one way of doing things, or dealing with people, or whatever, for long enough and when you get out of the comfort zone, things sure change. Red Hat is *way* different from Mandriva, so I’ve had 8 years of one way of working to overcome in the last 3mos. I think I’ve tackled it pretty good, despite some frustrating moments. In terms of infrastructure and how things work, and how people work with each other, it’s so different I don’t really have the words to express it. So it’s been quite the adjustment for me, and long hours, lots of learning, lots of note-taking, more than a few oopses, and a lot of patient people.
I can’t say much about the Fedora side of things as I’ve not really had a chance to step into the Fedora community yet, although I hope to do something there in the next few months. For now, I need to focus on the Red Hat side of things.. and I’m loving it. Especially the people I get to work with… with an organization as large as Red Hat, it’s no surprise that I’m running into new people all the time as my work takes me here, then there, and then waaay over there. =)
Anyways, everyone I’ve encountered has been stellar. Not just in how smart and knowledgeable they are, but also in how they carry themselves and how downright helpful they are. I really appreciate working with the Security Response Team (an absolutely fantastic bunch of guys that made me feel right at home from day one), and the developers I’ve had the occasion to work with, and the Quality Engineering folks are absolutely insane (in a good super-hard-working way!).
To finish it off, thanks all of you for making my first 90 days awesome, and for all the incredible hard work you do. I can’t tell you how much easier it’s made the transition for me, and I appreciate it quite a lot.
Rahul Sundaram
I wish you would expand on the differences between Mandriva and Red Hat a bit more. It would be interesting to know our approaches are different. Not just the technology, the people as well. Can you do that?
May 15, 2009 @ 16:39:41Vox
It’s great to see you are enjoying your new job and workplace…I hope you keep enjoying this for a long while
May 15, 2009 @ 23:47:00vdanen
Rahul: I could, but I don’t necessarily want to… =) The reason being, I don’t want to sling mud at anyone. Let’s put it this way.. the reason I went from Mandriva to Red Hat wasn’t because I thought the job would be better (I’m basically doing the same-ish thing), but because I felt the environment and people would be “better”. I.e. focusing more on teamwork, better ideals, and the “people are assets” mentality (whereas with Mandriva it felt more like people were liabilities).
I wouldn’t have a problem comparing communities (Fedora vs Mandriva), but I haven’t really experienced the Fedora community as such yet. I don’t really feel comfortable comparing companies any more than I have just because I don’t want to be “that guy” that runs around saying all kinds of bad things about their former employer. Not to say that working for Mandriva was *bad*, exactly, but there is definitely more of a focus on taking care of people at Red Hat and that’s something I really felt I needed at this point in my career.
I do expand on how I feel about Red Hat more in the First days at Red Hat, first impressions posting, which may give you a subtle idea about what I found neat about Red Hat (and, by assumption, what was lacking at Mandriva).
May 16, 2009 @ 08:20:33FACORAT Fabrice
I’m happy to see that you feel well and at home at RH
However Vincent, could you have a look at the following issue :
https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=23481
I’m having the following issue :
May 17, 2009 @ 09:29:22- urpmi upgrade of NIS server to 2009.1
- fresh install of workstations ( NSI auth )
- unlocking gnome-screen-saver will not work
- the user have a login and a password ( md5 ).
- the most interesting issue in the log is the following entry :
tcb_chkpwd: user unknown
- login from GDM/TTY or with su is working as expected. To unlock their session, the users have to do : new user -> go back to GDM, then select their user -> log in again on their session.
vdanen
Hi Fabrice. Well, I took a look at the bug and that one was a definite pain, but from my comments in there, it should have been fixed last year. The tcb_chkpwd bit is, iirc, from the tcb subsystem not being able to lookup the user for some reason. Usually, this is harmless (with Annvix, I recall seeing that a lot but authentication passed). So that may or may not be related.
But, AFAIK, that was fixed last year, and should have stayed fixed unless something changed (maybe someone backed something out of shadow-utils or something changed in tcb… I believe pterjan was doing some work there).
I honestly don’t know what to suggest.. before I could make any guesses at this, I’d have to download 2009.1 and see for myself what is going on, and I’m not sure when I will have time to be able to do that. Has anyone else been able to reproduce it? I didn’t see anything other than your note in the bug report. Also, was this an upgraded 2009.0->2009.1 box? Maybe you need to run pwunconv/pwconv and see if that flips a bit somewhere that will fix it? If it’s a fresh install, like I said, unless something has changed either in shadow-utils or the installer, it should work.
May 17, 2009 @ 13:27:16FACORAT Fabrice
The server have been upgrade from 2008.1 to 2009.1.
May 18, 2009 @ 02:08:14The workstations are fresh install with mandriva autoinstall. I will try to do one with the Powerpack DVD to see if the issue comes from the autoinstall