Dag Wieers wrote: > On Tue, 13 Nov 2007, todd w. wrote: > >> Dag Weers stated: >> >>> What is missing to me is something more similar to smit or smitty on >> AIX. >>> A modular interface to drive scripts with a well-structured menu. >>> Such an Open-Source project with the right spirit will no doubt attract >>> lost of people to write modules and new features. >> Ack, no.... (please). Smit is clunky at best. Maybe I'm biased - but I >> expect my admins to know commands and to execute them. > > Right, let's use highly expensive sysadmins for stupid operational > procedures and support. >
But are they best off learning a framework executing commands or writing simple scripts, shell functions, and alaises to execute commands? Clearly at some point a framework is helpful and at some point it's overkill. Eg, @uchicago we wrap the useradd command to do arbitrarily different things on different boxes, depending on both our general "template" and any additions our overrides for that host. Our "framework" is a 10 line shell script with a 5 line helper function for finding any overrides. Any "highly expensive" sysadmin can understand, debug, or extend the script very quickly and easily. I think the interesting question is not if there's value in a general system management tool but at what point does it's value v. cost exceed simple homegrown solutions. And at that point, where your scale or problem is large enough that you've exceeded homegrown solutions, is there all much value in which one RHAT happened to include in the distro? Our scale here is a couple hundred systems with low-to-moderate levels of customization. My experience has been that this was easier to hand-roll that than use someone else's tool. > >> I also believe smit is owned by IBM. I haven't heard that it would be open >> sourced. ;) > > I don't want smitty per se, I don't like every aspect of smitty. But a > framework where modules and scripts can be structured and improved in a > community fashion looks very interesting to me. > > PS Especially if you have a heterogenous network with lots of different > Unix and Linux distributions I would see the benefit of having one > interface for sysadmin tasks that looks the same (even though the > underlaying commands are different) > This I certainly agree with. We are lucky in that we have a pretty homogeneous environment. -Andrew _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
