Thursday June 09, 2005
how to approach systems management a.k.a. KISS
When speaking to many customers about Solaris there are few things that sometimes surfaces after a bit of discussion .... GUIs and management tools, are often high on that list. It therefore triggered me to write a bit about this when I saw Peter's blog and comment. Yes Solaris might not have GUIs for everything but as people know, Solaris is/was mainly a server operating system, this has both pros and cons (and effects) and as Peter rightly says many customer demands us to give them CLI's. This is easily understood if you ever have been tasked to manage tens to hundreds of servers at any time.
I also remember when working with DG/UX1 ... where the management tools would tell you in the log files what commands you actually executed after moving/clicking around in the menus .. so what do you think the customers started to do after a few of those sessions ..... you guessed right .... using the CLI
But life is changing ... Solaris is more and more common if not on workstations and laptops but sunrays. This, if nothing else really puts the Solaris user interface (GUIs ?) in the spotligth. So the first thing that was done to Microsoftify it is as you may guess JDS. Addressing the interface an end user experience will obviously take us one step forward, but still wont solve the many management tasks you may need to execute on a Solaris server. But before you start to create the next wizzy GUI you better ask yourself what is it you really want to accomplish .... Sometimes the GUI will, because of it's nature, provide you with a better picture as Jon and Simon proves, but an other excellent example of the "other way" is e.g. zfs, it is not what you should do to a filesystem but what a filesystem should do to you! (and yes zfs is coming
So when we (and that's a whole bunch of people .... including Bev (who needs to start blog'in ), Anay and Baban) are taking about KISS2 we don't only mean nice GUIs but ... what it really means to approach and manage a Solaris system ..... stay tuned .....1 or even AIX and smit for that matter
2 Keep It Simple Solaris
tag:opensolaris and solaris
( Jun 09 2005, 06:47:09 AM GMT+00:00 ) Permalink
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