On Thu, 10 Oct 2002 at 10:46am, Larry Dunham wrote > I don't know what lists you belong to (I belong to 10 or 12), but this is > the only list I've ever heard of where the default reply goes to the person > who posted the question rather than back to the list. "Reply All" is a
Hmm, let's see -- this one, several local to Duke, XFS, beowulf, nfs, ide-arrays, pvfs-users... Of those, only nfs sets reply-to, and that may well be b/c I'm subscribed in digest mode. > bandwidth waster, since if you click to reply to this message, I'll get a > message from you and the same message from the list...silly huh? My vote is > that all replies by default go back to the list only. And where does that leave those unsubscribed to the list and needing a quick answer -- the very newbies you speak of below? If you want Reply-To, it's trivial to set it yourself for mails to any list (well, depeding on your mail software -- I have no idea (nor desire to know) how to use the virus vector you're using). > To swing things back on topic, I think some of the frustration felt by > newer users of AMANDA is that there's nothing intuitive about it. Our I'm sorry, but I don't consider a rant (such as follows) about a the supposed superiority of GUI tools and supposed lack of amanda docs on topic. > AMANDA, like the whole Unix/Linux world, may have a lot of geek appeal, but > frankly, I have an IT department to run; I'm not interested in geek > appeal--I need applications I can set up and run without having to spend all > day searching for arcane answers to basic operational questions. > > I'm certainly not the world's biggest Bill Gates fan, and no one is happier > than I that *n*x boxes are giving us an alternative to padding Bill's > wallet, but the OS has a long way to go to become a serious MS competitor in > the business world. Command line business apps went away 10 years ago > because the graphical environment had a learning curve for new employees > that was much shorter, cutting the cost of ownership. Where is the > advantage to using AMANDA? It's "free" but if you spend hundreds of dollars > in lost productivity getting it up and running, what is gained? > > Most businesses aren't interested in using *n*x as a political statement > simply to raise a nemesis for MS. It has to work and work efficiently. > Documentation for AMANDA sucks, and for a complex command-line application, > supposedly coming of age for business applications, that just doesn't cut > it. I'm only replying to this b/c you've really pushed some of my buttons. I am sick and tired of people claiming that any tool without a GUI is automatically inferior to those with one. I literally see no place for a GUI with amanda. *Maybe* for amrecover, but for setup and day to day operations, a GUI would simply introduce an unnecessary layer of complexity. Most GUI apps I've seen slow me down relative to the command line (e.g. Windows' "Search for Files and Folders" vs. locate/find). The most basic rule of computing (as with most things) is to use what works best for you. If you think (as you seem to) that amanda is too hard to understand, then maybe it isn't the best tool for you. Personally, a couple of days spent with docs/INSTALL, the "chapter" at backupcentral, and the list archvies and I had a test setup up and running. Admittedly, it takes a bit of time to wrap one's head around amanda's backup philosophy, but that's only b/c it's very different (and, IMO, better) than the standard "incrementals on weekdays, full on Saturday" strategy. But even this is explained in the docs. Between the docs directory, the man pages, FAQ-O-Matic, the chapter, and the mailing list archives, I really am at a loss to see how anyone can claim that amanda is poorly documented. If you'd like to debate this anymore, let's take if off-list, as it really is OT. -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University
