church of default

every sysadmin I know spends a solid chunk of their day googling for how to do something and combing through the blog posts, mailing list archives, and forum threads that appear hoping to find some faint signal in the noise.  this is my attempt to add some signal.

church of default?

When building a system there are defaults. Distro defaults, packages defaults, default directories, default settings, vendor defaults, etc. There are also a lot of conventions, and some of these defaults and conventions may bear the badge of being a standard, but altogether they’re “the default”.

Then there is “the delta”. The delta is everything you do to make the parts of your system work together. The configuration changes, the settings tweaks, the custom this, and integration that. The scripts, the hacks. The delta is your product. It is both where you add value and what you are responsible for from that day forward.

In the “church of default” defaults are presumed innocent until proven guilty, the inverse goes for delta.

Why?

The defaults are already documented. They are already reproducible. They are the most likely to be QA and regression tested against. They will be easiest to patch for security and bugfixes. Future employees have already dealt with them at previous employers. They represent the best guess of people who have spent more time on this than you, people who will incur real support and product reputation costs if its not a good setting. The defaults are already being used by many who have gone before you as human beta-testing shields. Respect the upstream.

Obviously you need to do everything to get your system working, but ideally you would do exactly that and no more.