On Thu, 2007-11-15 at 12:07 +0100, Dag Wieers wrote: > > 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.
Isn't that pretty much what linuxconf was? Perhaps it didn't have a good community spirit but it seemed pretty close to what you are asking for. It described itself as a framework for writing modules and it had a text menu interface, a GUI, a web interface, and a CLI interface. My memory was that linuxconf was nearly universally despised, similar to my experience with smitty. Webmin seems to be as close as it gets to an open-source cross-platform solution for administration, and there are themes that allow it to work pretty well with text browsers like lynx so it can have a "text interface" sort of. Since everything is pretty much simple "form" submission you can even "script" it a little with some command line http magic. I must be in the minority, but I thought yast was pretty useless as an admin tool in an enterprise. It seemed like ever module let me configure about 75% of what I needed, but it never quite let me do everything and seemed too difficult to customize. This always left me hunting up the config file anyway. Not only that, but I don't remember being able to restrict access to setup functions based on user (for example allowing some admins to only admin users while others can only install software, etc), it seems like it was all or nothing. I'll admit to not using it in a long time now by software standards (probably SLES7 or 8). Has it improved significantly in these areas? In the end I'll admit to disliking almost all of these types of tools. They invariably destroy my nicely commented config files, turning a perfectly crafted and commented dhcpd.conf or named.conf (just as an example) into a completely unrecognizable mess. Some of the junior admins use them minimally for things lie viewing logs, print job administration, and user administration, but very little if anything else. Later, Tom _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
