David Boyes wrote:
Here's my point... The biggest barrier to my sharing support
responsibility for z/Linux is the console.
Let me pose this question: how many of your colleagues know what to do
after hitting L1-A on a Sun console, or accidentally disconnecting a
serial cable to a console port? If they do know, how did they learn? Do
they understand the difference between how to respond on a SPARCstation
versus an E15000 (bonus points if they know *which* console on the E15K
to use to respond)?
If they do, then that's the result of education, not technology. I think
the same consideration applies here -- but now we're in the realm of
philosophy, not technology.
Let's try both approaches and see what comes of it. My approach will fit
either one; maybe we're solving different levels of the same problem.
Unfortunately, not many. I'd say 10 out of 50 would know. The rest
depend on a remote terminal server product we use. They telnet to host
and port, authenticate, and there's the console... or in a couple of
cases, a menu to choose a console. They know the basics of telnet ^]
send brk. Now some of them *use* to know how to do more, but haven't
had to use it in years and lost it. For our E10k and Sunfire systems,
we again, had a subset of admins who were trained on how manage them.
They had the same problem, if you weren't on the E10k/Sunfire subteam,
you avoided supporting the systems on them because you didn't know the
way to do it. Sure we'd try and cross train others... but they used it
so rarely, they forgot how. Even worse, "Where's that link on how to do
this/that?" emails. In the end, only the subteam ends up supporting them.
Again, my employer can't be the only one with this type of problem, can it?
A small note, though... if you actually did know how to get to a console
on the E10k and Sunfire systems, once there, it was fully usable, unlike
3270. And unless I'm misunderstanding you, your line mode approach
breaks lots of things as well, like a TUI (see Yast), or bash command
line history functions, for example.
*Brandon
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