On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 9:21 PM, Konstantin Olchanski <olcha...@triumf.ca> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 10:55:33AM -0400, Lamar Owen wrote: >> On Thursday, June 09, 2011 07:21:29 PM you wrote: >> > The curses based, text compatible system-config-network needs >> > everything a typical desktop or server needs. It lacks some of the >> > foofiness of NetworkManager, but that's both unnecessary and dangerous >> > on a stable desktop or server, as we've seen happen repeatedly for new >> > installations of RHEL based systems over the last 5 years or so. >> >> Heh. Why would you want to stick with such an old codebase, Nico? > > > I think the wrong question was asked and a different wrong question was > answered. > > One issue is GUI vs TUI. > > Gui is okey when you are standing in front of the computer > console and the X11 graphics are working and you have a working monitor > of reasonable size.
And a network connection needing attention is very likely to disable the X services, especially for remote X servers. > If you are not standing in front of the computer, you have to tunnel > X11 graphics through an ssh tunnel. Okey for a computer in the office > next door, but good luck doing this through a trans-Atlantic > or trans-Pacific link. (You say "use VNC!", well good luck getting > a VNC connection to a computer behind a firewall on the other side > of a VPN connection. Hint - it can be done by tunneling a reverse > connection (server to client) through an ssh tunnel). Oh, my, you've brought back laughs. I wrote one of the early VNC ports, to SunOS 4.1.x. Yeah, it's fun to get that working internationally or over a messed up network. I've been encouraging a switch to NX from www.nomachine.com, to save money on X servers and get a much better connection than VNC provides. > On my side, I have the instructions for setting up new computers > written up on a web page. I want to be able to cut-and-paste them > to a command line, so "authconfig --enablenis --nisdomain xxx --update" is > cool, > but "run system-config-users, then push these buttons with mouse" is not cool. Now, *THAT* is when it's nice to have a Windows box with a remote serial connection or, if the network is working well, and SSH session. And yeah, being able to configure such settings in an init script or as part of a system update is also prize, especially for clusters or scattered servers.