this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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system wide changes tend to create system wide problems. Never touch a running system.
What does this even mean? You have to touch it to make changes, upgrade, improve, etc.
The phrase is an old school principle of German server admins. Backups were super expensive back then and rolling back the system after an "upgrade" or "change" did also cost ALOT of money.
The original phrase was altered and used to be a sports thing (from baseball I believe). It used to be "never change a winning team"
Ya, I kinda figured that's what you might mean, and in that case it's entirely wrong.
Long uptimes used to be a point of pride for admins with how long they could keep a single boot session running. But these days a long uptime just means very outdated security patches.
"Never touch a running system" is very much the same vein now. You should constantly be touching the system for system maintenance and such.
That's not what "never touch a running system" is meant for. It creates a lot more problems (as you experienced yourself) to dabble with DNS on an application-level
Nope. First of all I only had one problem and only with Firefox. Second the phrase is also usable in this case. If I change my dns settings in my system (or my router), there is a chance that ALL applications have a problem with resolving URLs. Making most changes only on application layer did save me alot of time which others had to use for troubleshooting.
I mean you do you of course, but to me that's not logical at all, it's literally just one line of numbers that you would have to troubleshoot (if at all) and the entire system would be fixed instead of doing that for each application separately