“We define a workstation as computer hardware dedicated to a single customer’s work. Usually, this means a customer’s desktop or laptop PC. In the modern environment, we also have remotely accessed PCs, virtual machines, and dockable laptops, among others. Workstations are usually deployed in large quantities and have long life cycles (birth, use, death). As a result, if you need to make a change on all of them, doing it right is complicated and critical. If something goes wrong, you’ll probably find yourself working late nights, blearily struggling to fix a big mess, only to face grumpy users in the morning. Consider the life cycle of a computer and its operating system. Rémy Evard produced an excellent treatment of this in his paper “An Analysis of UNIX System Configuration” (Evard 1997). Although his focus was UNIX hosts, it can be extrapolated to others. The model he created is shown in Figure 3.1.”
