Adminning and the CLI (was: rescue Digest, Vol 83, Issue 18)

[Joost van de Griek-3]

2009/10/21 Phil Stracchino <alaric@...>:

> IMHO, if you don't know how to use the command line, you shouldn't be
> trying to admin ....  well, pretty much any platform but Windows or Mac,
> really.  (Mac perhaps more so than Windows.  In Windows there has at
> least always *been* a legacy CLI, even if it's been a crappy one and you
> could only do a limited set of tasks with it.  On classic MacOS, if you
> couldn't do it through the GUI, you COULDN'T DO IT, period.  I'm unclear
> to what extent this has changed with OSX.)

For a bit, it had turned the other way around: you can do things in
the CLI in OS X that you can't (or couldn't) in the GUI. Haven't
played with OS X Server since Tiger, but I must say I'm impressed with
Apple's server admin tools. There's very little that can't be done
through a GUI, and a good one, too.

.tsooJ
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[hike]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 12:54 PM, Joost van de Griek <gyorpb@...>wrote:

> 2009/10/21 Phil Stracchino <alaric@...>:
>
> > IMHO, if you don't know how to use the command line, you shouldn't be
> > trying to admin ....  well, pretty much any platform but Windows or Mac,
> > really.  (Mac perhaps more so than Windows.  In Windows there has at
> > least always *been* a legacy CLI, even if it's been a crappy one and you
> > could only do a limited set of tasks with it.  On classic MacOS, if you
> > couldn't do it through the GUI, you COULDN'T DO IT, period.  I'm unclear
> > to what extent this has changed with OSX.)
>
> For a bit, it had turned the other way around: you can do things in
> the CLI in OS X that you can't (or couldn't) in the GUI. Haven't
> played with OS X Server since Tiger, but I must say I'm impressed with
> Apple's server admin tools. There's very little that can't be done
> through a GUI, and a good one, too.
>
> .tsooJ
> _______________________________________________
> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>

in both solaris and red hat, there are "things" that cannot be accomplished
in the gui that can easily be accomplished on the command line.
the gui tools are the publisher's attempts to satisfy the customer's demands
for a system that is cheaper to maintain.
that is, pointy-clicky guys are always cheaper than cli guys.
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[Nate-30]

> On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 12:54 PM, Joost van de Griek
>
> the gui tools are the publisher's attempts to satisfy the customer's
> demands
> for a system that is cheaper to maintain.
> that is, pointy-clicky guys are always cheaper than cli guys.

While that's true to extent, it sounds a little oversimplified to me.

I think designing a really good GUI that has the same meta-linguistic
flexibility of a good command line environment is very difficult, so the
typical range of expression possible in most GUIs is lower than it is in
command line environments.  (There are far more bad GUIs than there are
bad command line environments because designing a good GUI is so
difficult.)  So because of this cost/difficulty in GUI design,
statistically speaking if a worker wants to maximize their ability to
problem solve and accomplish tasks, it makes sense for them to learn a
command line.  However the learning curve is initially steeper for most
command line environments, so someone who is either averse to that curve
or short on time will gravitate to the GUIs, which ends up creating the
two groups of IT workers you describe ("pointy-click" and "cli guys").

Of course this statistical reality in the distribution of the workforce
also feeds back into the economics of developing interfaces...

- Nate
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[gsm-2]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 10:30:09AM -0400, nate@... wrote:
>Of course this statistical reality in the distribution of the workforce
>also feeds back into the economics of developing interfaces...

It also allows for a manufacturer/packager to change the way something is
done.

For example, the various ways of storing userids, passwords, names, etc
across different Unix systems (or even Linux distributions). Compare
a point and click user add screen (or a text one) to the various
useradd/adduser scripts to editing /etc/passw, /etc/shadow directly then
adding them to LDAP, KERBEROS, smbpasswd, afppasswd and so on.

 From what I remember there were three different ways of storing user informatio
n in MacOS, the original, changed in 10.4 and then again in 10.5, but I
think 10.6 is the same as 10.5.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm@...  N3OWJ/4X1GM
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[Steve Sandau]

> in both solaris and red hat, there are "things" that cannot be accomplished
> in the gui that can easily be accomplished on the command line.
> the gui tools are the publisher's attempts to satisfy the customer's demands
> for a system that is cheaper to maintain.
> that is, pointy-clicky guys are always cheaper than cli guys.

And beyond admin tasks, the Unix command line environment with tools
like grep, awk, sed, cut and so on (no to mention loops on the command
line) is so infinitely flexible that you can do amazing things on one
line that you could never do in a GUI without programming your own.

As a really simple example, I was testing WebLogic servers response
times recently, two servers each on four boxes. I used something like:

for server in 192.168.10.1 192.168.10.2 192.168.10.3 192.168.10.4
   do
     for port in 8001 8002
       do
         time wget http://$server:$port/ > /dev/null 2>&1
       done
   done

to check how long it took each server to give up its login page. I have
no idea how I would do that in any other way without way more effort and
less flexibility.

As I said to the auditor working with me a few weeks ago, while I was
showing him what kinds of info we could extract from logs, Unix is just
so cool...

Steve
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