On 15 Nov 2007, at 23:35, John Summerfield wrote:
Andrew Hecox wrote:
John Summerfield wrote:
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.
I would rather that she read the 10 line shell script so that she
understood unambiguously what it means to our site to "add" a user,
even
if it took an hour. If we're going to have an admin for 3-5 years,
I'm
happy to take 3 full months of training so that they can understand
the
breadth of what we do and how we do it.
<snipped list of virt-manager/xen/virsh problems>
I _have_ used the free version Microsoft's Virtual PC. It's fairly
basic, but it really is easy to use, and importantly, it doesn't
require the hardware virtualisation I need to run fully virtualised
computers in xen.
I find this interesting because in two cases recently, I've done two
completely different things.
---
1) Virtualisation:
I use VMWare Server on my workstation, because it has a nice gui, I
don't want to do incredibly complex things, it's well tested, stable
and quick to grasp. I don't like Xen, even with virt-manager because
it hasn't reached that level of stability and ease of use. (We do use
Xen on RHEL elsewhere) - so in this case I picked the best pre-made
tool because on my workstation I value convenience.
---
2) Diagnosing mis-performing servers:
We have some monitoring software made by company X which we use to
monitor our systems. It isn't realtime because it's discretely
sampling, it does graph trends and do alerting.
X also wants to sell us a product that does realtime monitoring, in
that it SSH's into systems and runs all the commands that you'd use to
monitor all the aspects of a running machine; it only works while you
have the client connected. In the event of a badly behaved server,
we're supposed to be able to fire up this tool and it will instantly
show us all sorts of eye candy to help us work out what's going wrong.
Lovely graphs for management types too.
The problem is, neither myself, nor any of my colleagues will use it
because when the sh*t hits the fan, the first thing we do is SSH into
the machine and start flexing our fingers because that is the fastest
way for *us* to diagnose it. None of us will ever use someone else's
pre-made tool for that because it puts us one level removed from
knowing exactly what is going on. We actually take pride in arcane
commands on terminal windows that make non-Linuxy people's eyes roll.
---
Like all things, some people work one way, some people work others and
you have to pick the right tool for how you like to work in any
particular situation. I'm more likely to type "sudo vi /etc/passwd;
sudo vi /etc/group; sudo passwd <user>" than I am to even run useradd
much less fire up webmin or usermin. I'm more often than not running
gconf-editor than I am tinkering with Gnome Preferences Applets. For
me, it's not about speed, it's about getting it right first time,
every time and knowing exactly what I did and what the effect will be.
(and the whole adding users via useradd is sooo passé guys... Ours are
automatically added to LDAP when they join the organisation via a feed
from HR ;o)
--
Sam
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