On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 7:40 PM, Ben Rockwood <b...@cuddletech.com> wrote: > Peter Tribble wrote: >> So, a question for the weekend: >> >> When administering something, do you prefer to issue a bunch of commands >> to set configuration parameters, or edit a configuration file that the >> thing can read? >> >> (Where edit doesn't necessarily mean vi or emacs, but could also mean the >> automated generation of a configuration file via any means. In fact, normally >> the automated way rather than the by hand way.) >> > > Good and fun question. > > Obviously, it depends on the implementation... we've all seen good and > bad examples of each. > > In general, I'd say CLI. Disk configuration is a good example; VxVM vs > Linux RAID. > > Continuing with the storage example, I hate tools that opt to use > multiple configuration tools, such as LVM's lv/pv/vg/blah commands. > > > But when it comes down to it, I opt for CLI mostly because you typically > get quick feedback on whether or not your syntax was wrong or you did > the wrong thing. With files the edit/start/edit/start/edit/start cycle > gets old. > > The interesting middle ground is shells such as Solaris is now more > commonly using, example svccfg and zonecfg. Offers the best of both > worlds, but I still like traditional CLI.
CLI is good as long as it doesn't try to be too clever: A very recent example was yesterday where I was doing a LU for S10U1->U6. Vold hung (surprise!), which caused the initial BE creation to hang. Trying to abort it left things in an inconsistent state, ludelete, etc. wouldn't work (and just complained), so I had to do the 'unsupported' thing and edit /etc/lutab to remove the BE entry, and try again. Had this option not been available to me, I would have been rather annoyed. Editing files doesn't have this issue. This is I suspect why some people greatly dislike the ODM in AIX for issues like this. _______________________________________________ sysadmin-discuss mailing list sysadmin-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/sysadmin-discuss
