Should You Install Development Tools on Production Hosts?
Every once in a while I get sucked back into the age-old system administrator religious argument: should you install development tools on a production host? There are basically two schools of thought: Yes, if you need them. Despite the production nature of the host there are times where you might want to build software, perhaps something like the VMware Tools kernel modules on a Linux server, and having them helps a lot. They don’t take up much space and it’s nice to keep all your hosts identical. No, absolutely not. “Development” tools should only be on hosts that are for “development.” Build a software lifecycle management system to move everything from development to test to production. The presence of compilers …
