On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 10:46:05AM -0500, Larry Dunham wrote: > I don't know what lists you belong to (I belong to 10 or 12), but this is > the only list I've ever heard of where the default reply goes to the person > who posted the question rather than back to the list. "Reply All" is a > bandwidth waster,
Then, like I said before, get a mail client with a 'list reply' feature or tell your current MUA's vendor to add it. > To swing things back on topic, I think some of the frustration felt by > newer users of AMANDA is that there's nothing intuitive about it. How true. Looking at the posts I've seen in my time on the list (including one currently-running thread), there seem to be a lot of people who want to tell their backup system exactly what to do. amanda's 'just tell me what to do and I'll figure out how to do it for you' design seems to be too simple for them. But I suspect that's not what you meant... > AMANDA, like the whole Unix/Linux world, may have a lot of geek appeal, but > frankly, I have an IT department to run; I'm not interested in geek > appeal--I need applications I can set up and run without having to spend all > day searching for arcane answers to basic operational questions. So do I. That's why I run most of my servers with an OS that delivers meaningful (if sometimes a little cryptic) error messages instead of stripping all meaning from them in an attempt to be "friendly". It's also why I run apps (like, for instance, amanda) which I can set up once and then forget about. > Command line business apps went away 10 years ago > because the graphical environment had a learning curve for new employees > that was much shorter, cutting the cost of ownership. ...which is a flaw in the business world, not in *nix. These days, businesses tend to focus very heavily on the short term, often to the detriment of the long term. Is it better to choose software which is quick to learn and lets a new employee accomplish more in his first month at the company or something which takes a little longer to learn, but allows him to do more over the year and a half (average IT turnover time, last I heard) that he's working there? You're also ignoring version drift. How long has it been since Windows last made a significant change in its user interface? How long has it been since amanda or bash/tcsh/your-shell-here did so? *nix apps are mostly learn-once. Windows apps seem much more likely to "update" their look in incompatible ways on a regular basis, requiring frequent retraining. Beyond that, this is just as much an effect of market penetration as it is of GUI's supposed superiority. Windows apps are quick to pick up because 99% of the population is already familiar with Windows. If 99% used *nix, then you could get them going on *nix just as quickly. Funny how you can get someone doing something they already know faster than you can teach them something new, isn't it? > Where is the > advantage to using AMANDA? It's "free" but if you spend hundreds of dollars > in lost productivity getting it up and running, what is gained? How often does amanda upgrade in ways that break your existing config? (Never, to my knowledge.) How often does <competing product> do so? How much ongoing support does amanda require? (None, aside from updating disklist when machines are added to or removed from the backup schedule.) How much does <competing system> require? Even if amanda requires more time to set up initially (which, IMO, is only likely if you want to make it do something it's not designed to), it may well require much less ongoing maintenance, thus recovering the "lost productivity getting it up and running" and then some. > Most businesses aren't interested in using *n*x as a political statement > simply to raise a nemesis for MS. It has to work and work efficiently. Yep. That's why my employer switched over 85%+ of their computers from Windows to Linux before I got here and we're constantly on the lookout for opportunities to change over the few remaining Windows machines. I'm told that they got fed up with Windows crashing (yeah, I hear it doesn't do that as much these days) and decided they needed something more stable for some quasi-embedded boxes, then decided they liked it so much they switched over the servers and desktops as well.
