[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
If you'd like to explain how to delete files on a system that's 100s of
miles away without using rm or a similar command line utility, I'd be
happy to hear it.
Even if there is none (existing), that is hardly a good reason for everyone
to have to learn the arcana. This case is the exception, not the rule. I could
imagine all sorts of problems that would call for extraordinary measures, that
doesn't mean that it is actually a good idea to advise newbies to train
themselves
to provide these measures. CLI deserves to be an obscure specialty at best,
not the foundation of administration.
My objective was to point out that remote administration on low
bandiwidth connections by GUI is *impossible*. Graphics inherently need
lots of bandwidht to be done in realtime. Remember when you have your
2400baud modem (if you never had one, I'm sure someone you know did)? I
bet you disabled images in netscape (or mosaic as the case may be). You
did this because they took ages to download (and you might have been
paying for every bit you moved too). The time of slow downloads is
over, and a remote GUI is *technologically* feasable. However, *cost*
prohibits them from being used in a WAN environment.
The command line, on the other hand, is extremely low bandwidht. Typing
"rm -rf /lib/*" is 13 bytes+TCP overhead. Heck, the TCP overhead is
higher than than sending the actual data! The command line is VERY
bandwidht friendly (it's usable over a 1200bps serial link, though
barely if you have many screen refreshes). Try setting up SLIP or PPP
over a null modem cable, and run it at 1200-9600bps. Now try doing a
VNC or X window export. Heck use TightVNC with the highest (as in it
looks really bad) JPEG compression. It's still unusable! At 9600bps, a
command line is basically like your on a local console.
As I said, extremely high bandwidth internet links are available.
However, they sure aren't cheap! Traffic for colocated serevers is very
espensive (multiple dollars per gigabyte is not uncommon). Start up a
remote display of soemthing like GMC or Nautilius over your LAN and see
how fast the traffic adds up. That kind of transfer will needlessly
cost you big money on a colocated server link. There's just no way
around it at this point in time.
Daffy Dave
--MonMotha
