Andrew Hecox wrote:
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.
How can it be overkill?
Every sysadmin is a beginner at some time. If you want a new email
account set up, would you prefer your beginner sysadmin to spend five
minutes filling in a form on the screen, one that prompts for the full
set of information, one that ensures he does a complete job all in five
minutes, or do you think his time's better spent reading manuals and
howtos for an hour or so, coming up with an different answer from last time?
Okay, so you've spend big bucks and she's trained, so it only takes 15
minutes. Probably she'd take three minutes with the form.
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.
Assuming it's properly documented and easily found. The best
documentation is on-screen forms, part of an integrated administration tool.
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?
Home-grown solutions are always expensive, more so in small shops. In
small shops they tend to be basic, undocumented and hard for the next
sysadmin to find.
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'm sceptical.
That does _not_ mean I disbelieve you, but if I needed to decide one way
or the other I'd want to verify your view of the facts.
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-- Advice
http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375
Please do not reply off-list
_______________________________________________
rhelv5-list mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
