If anything, it's a huge pain to configure and manage because his software follows the Unix way more faithfully than most Unix server software: collections of s

If anything, it's a huge pain to configure and manage because his software follows the Unix way more faithfully than most Unix server software: collections of small programs that communicate over well defined interfaces. As a programmer, it's great. The very minimal feature set and lack of high level abstractions makes the code very easy to understand and modify. The fact that everything uses stdio makes debugging really easy. As a sysadmin it sucks because providing the features your users rightly expect forces you to maintain patches as well as configuration. And a good deal of that configuration is long pipelines where tiny changes have huge consequences. Set the magic option in the magic variable to change behavior. Certain files that aren't explicitly mentioned anywhere just have to exist, and one wrong permission or file ownership just breaks everything and it's really annoying to figure out what's wrong.