Date: Fri, 30 Jan 1998 12:01:38 -0300 From: daniel_sobral@voga.com.br To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Admin GUI tool (was: RE: /usr/src/release/sysinstall needs YOU . :-)) Message-ID: <8325659C.005134CF.00@papagaio.voga.com.br>
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Just to put in my two cents... > <soapbox> > If you want to start writing a nifty GUI admin tool, > then great. The admin tools that come with AIX are > supposed to be well worth it. (Not having used AIX > I can't confirm/deny this assertion.) Since I do work with AIX, daily, I'll comment on this. There are two tools, in fact. SMIT, which is a text-based, menu-driven admin tool gone graphical (at good job at that, but still a _text_ tool at it's heart) and VSM. Now, VSM is very nice looking, but it is _not_ intuitive. I suppose that one can be bothered to learn it to the point of it being easy to use. IBM people stick to SMIT. Now, there *is* innovation at AIX 4.3, which I have yet to see, including web-based SMIT (which would probably work just fine, since SMIT interface, being text-based at heart, would do fine at web) and remote management of other vendors workstations (ie, HP, DEC, Sun, etc, though I don't know exactly which). Maybe we can talk IBM into doing remote SMIT for FreeBSD??? :-) Now, I have worked _two days_ on HP-UX 10.20, and it's GUI admin tool, SAM, kicked the hell out of SMIT and VSM. It's not as graphical as VSM. Actually, it's not graphical at all, in the sense VSM is. But it was designed with *graphical* interfaces in mind, so it's much more intuitive to use (than smit), even though it can be run on text mode too (and I did it, and it was fine). Well, I *do* have a point here. Don't overdo it. Don't let the graphical interface get in the way, because admin usually have a job to get done, and are not really that much interested in exploring how you represent things graphically. And I think that is even more true in the FreeBSD niche. -- Daniel C. Sobral (8-DCS) Daniel_Sobral@voga.com.br Tagline: * FreeBSD. Earth.
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