>>>>> "Jeff" == Jeff McCune <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Jeff> I like this idea of a tool that enables SA's of legacy sites Jeff> to hit the ground running. By educational, do you mean a tool Jeff> like OpenNMS that scans and informs the admin about her site? Jeff> Or perhaps more robust than that, identifying problems with Jeff> easily implemented solutions the SA may not even know about? I think this is a great goal. We do something similar with bcfg2, and have found that users like it. We only do low-level detection at this point, but overall, it provides a nice, gentle introduction to how the server works. >> Put yourself in the position of a beginner. You're overwhelmed, >> your job is on the line, and everything's on fire. And you can >> employ tools that with *some* probability, put out the fires, and >> with *another* finite probability, make them worse. What are you >> going to do? Many people just avoid anything that can make things >> worse. Jeff> True, but what if we made the tools easier to understand for Jeff> beginners? If we focused on understandable processes for Jeff> package installation and simple file distribution it might Jeff> simultaneously reduce the risk as it increased accessibility. I think that process transparency is really the key attribute here. We wrote a paper[1] last year, largely as a response to Alva's cost model talk from two years ago. The basic idea is to allow multiple representative models in the same tool, so that administrators can start simple, and move up from there. We've gotten some positive results back on this; once users get a handle on things, they want to do more sophisticated modelling; if the plumbing can stay the same, all the better. -nld [1] ftp://ftp.mcs.anl.gov/pub/bcfg/papers/pay-as-you-go.pdf _______________________________________________ lssconf-discuss mailing list lssconf-discuss@inf.ed.ac.uk http://lists.inf.ed.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/lssconf-discuss
