Re: O/S Choice for Database Servers

  • From: Bill Ferguson <wbfergus@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: niall.litchfield@xxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2011 06:31:23 -0700

Many good points in your rant Niall.

But, I will make a comment on one point. Our AD was very poorly
designed and implemented. It is setup like agency.department.net
(which if you try to connect via the web, doesn't resolve to
anything), while in all actuallity, the address format that does work
is in the format of region.agency.gov.

This caused me extreme grief a few years back when installing Oracle,
as it auto-magically read the AD information and appended that to my
database name, making the database unfindable (and unworkable) in our
environment. I finally stumbled upon the fact that if the machine was
out of AD and in a workgroup, then no problems with the installation.
I have absolutely no idea what would happen if I now changed the
machine to be back in AD, now that installation is over.

I've held off on testing this aspect for two main reasons:
1.) It's working fine, so why try something that may break it again?
2.) Due to a big (at least to me), security issue with AD, I will
refrain as long as I can from having the server in AD.

<off-topic>
The security issue is that anybody at a higher AD level than myself
can easily write a GPO to make themselves an Admin, propagate the new
GPO to any machine they want, and have complete control of that
machine. When they are done screwing things up, they can just as
easily write another GPO to remove themselves from the Admin accounts,
leaving everybody scratching their heads as to what happened. We
tested this scenario a few years back to confirm, so I decided then
that as long as I can, I'll attempt to keep my servers out of AD. If
anything happens to them, it's my butt, and the folks we have in our
agency that have more permissions than I do, don't know squat about
Oracle, they can barely spell SQL Server, but of course being a
Micro$oft product, they are totally enamoured with it, even though
they don't use that either.
</off-topic>

-- 
-- Bill Ferguson
--
//www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l


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