On Friday, Oct 24, 2003, at 19:53 Europe/Rome, Jens A. Jensen wrote:
Please do not forget that we need some easy-to-use, GUI-based as well as command line based administration tools. The present Remote Manager telnet thing is archaic, unsecure, and next to impossible to use if you have more than just a handful of users to administer.
Also, we need a GUI-based tool to handle config.xml in an intuitive and yet structured way.
Keep in mind that sysadms configure stuff over the line, GUIs are useless in those cases. Even more: if you tell a sysadm that he/she has to use a GUI to configure something, he/she would not even consider using it.
The administration tool is not unsecure if you do it over an ssh tunnel, yet, I wish there was a way to configure the system without using a tool at all, just good old text editor over the wire.
'usability' means "easy to use" for the pool of users that you are targetting, you improve usability by writing tons of comments into the configuration file (httpd.conf style, for example) not by making a GUI on top of it. These guys don't know what to do with GUIs anyway and an administration tool makes it impossible to automate the configuration (say for backup, replication in clustering environment, etc).
low-tech as it seems, simple flat files with a lot of comments are probably the most usable technology for system administrators: the real users of any server.
not a suggestion, just food for thought.
-- Stefano.
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
