Opinion: Operating systems can take some funny turns

I was in Australia recently to speak at the Marcus Evans conference of Identity and Access Management in Sydney, and my wife and I took the opportunity to spend some vacation time along the coast of New South Wales exploring its attractions.

Driving my rental car on the left side of the road wasn't a major problem, and putting the turn signal stalk on the right side of the steering wheel with the left-side stalk controlling windshield wipers wasn't a problem most of the time. When I knew a turn was coming, or could see I wanted to change lanes, there was time to think about what I was doing and use the correct stalk. This could have led to a dangerous situation, but fortunately didn't.

How does that relate to you? Many people are changing the operating systems they're working with these days, migrating from NetWare, Windows or Unix to Linux for their servers and hosts. The movement to Linux on the desktop is also gathering steam (but the jury is still out on whether this will become a tide of change or merely a momentary ripple). There are similarities among all these operating systems but when you've used one relatively exclusively for many years, you become conditioned to look for certain signs that indicate potential problems and instinctively react to those signs.

A new operating system, like the roads in New South Wales, might disguise some of those signs so you don't seem them until it's almost too late to react. When you do, it might be the reflex reaction of many years' training rather than the action needed for your new operating system. One solution is to use the new operating system's scripting capabilities to alias your old actions (trivial example: in Linux create a DIR command that does an LS). The better course of action, though, is to learn the tools before you really need to use them in an emergency. Try practicing "emergency" situations to train yourself to react correctly. The network you save could be your own.