Re: [TCLUG:14414] Usability (was Ghost for Linux)

[Chris McKinley <lamfada@lugh.net>]

/* first, we do the rant, for those who wish to read it.  If not, they can
 * skip to the #endif for a possible solution to this whole Ghost debate.
 */
#ifndef EXTENDED_RANT_MODE
#define EXTENDED_RANT_MODE

First off, are we talking about end users or sysadmins?  A sysadmin should be
able to use the tools provided, especially tools like find, grep, cpio, cut, 
sed, etc.  Any sysadmin who can not use all of these tools should not be a 
senior, lead, or whatever sysadmin, and should continue to have someone coach
them until they know these tools and how to use them and combine them.  The 
cure for clueless sysadmins is not to hide the dirty stuff behind a pretty GUI,
such as IBM's WebSM, smit, or even smitty, primarily because there will be a 
time when you do not have access to these tools.  In fact, the saving grace of
a tool like smit is that it runs commandlines, and you can view the proposed
command line, and that it keeps a log of what it does.  

Now as to the question of lusers using these tools, I have to ask why they 
would be duplicating boxes like that.  It is not the realm of lusers to be 
doing this work.  Remember who we are dealing with here, and I apologize in 
advance if I offend anyone, however the luser is a person who when prompted
as to whether they are sure they want to logout, if the dialog box says you
might lose data, they call the help desk.  The luser is someone who wants to
reboot a UNIX box "because it works for the NT ones".  The luser is someone 
who has problems opening their POP3 mailbox in Outlook because it is 73Mb,
and then after you fix it ("cat /dev/null > /var/spool/mail/luser" after 
checking all his mail is "Status: RO", of course) and tell them how to avoid 
this problem in the future (check the little box to delete mail from server 
when you fetch it), has the same problem next week.  

Do we honestly want these people fscking around with Ghost?  If you were the 
creators of Tivo, do you want J Random Luser, even if he/she is a sysadmin or
geek, fscking around in the OS?  No, you do not.  Lets face it, this is a 
world which is increasingly being divided in to Morlocks and Eloi where 
computation is concerned, while the work of the Morlocks makes other areas,
such as publishing, financial markets, and travel to name a few, ever more 
accessable to everyone.  So, what I am saying here is that Ghost is not an
Eloi tool.  And for those Morlocks who specialize in UNIX, Ghost is not an
optimal solution.  I would compare Ghost/UNIX tools to perl/shell+[sed|awk].
In both cases you have a nice interface hiding sometimes ugly complexity, but
also hiding the true methods and cost associated with your actions.  In 
addition, you may end up at a point where tools such as Ghost / perl are not
usable, and it is at these points that knowledge of the smaller, more basic
tools becomes valuable.  If you dispute this, one of our admins recently ran 
into a situation which required that he use ed because no other editor could 
be used with the terminal type (a WYSE term, IRIC), and I have to use shell,
sed and awk a lot because perl is not available on many systems, either because
it is not part of the OS (gotta love standards), or because there is not 
available space, or because it is simply not needed. 

#endif

Now, on to the question of duplicating boxes, I believe RH has tools to do 
and enterprise install, or something like that.  This may be a better solution
than Ghost, and easier to deal with than cpio, and more robust than dd, 
however I have not used it.  YMMV.

-Chris

On Mon, 6 Mar 2000, Eric M. Hopper wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 06, 2000 at 08:00:43PM -0600, Ben Kochie wrote:
> > 
> > it's not a question of if they can..  the should be requiered to know
> > how to use standard tools that have been used for system duplicating
> > since unix was designed.  the point of linux is not to create lazy
> > admins.  it's there to teach good admins.  and a proerly setup boot
> > utils disk could be made with standard tools to allow for system
> > copying.  an experienced admin can create such a mini distro with a
> > little bit of dialog scripting to allow grunts to dupe
> > systems... insert floppy, insert cd, folow some instructions, and
> > bam.. new linux box, windows box, whatever.
> 
> 	I strongly disagree.
> 
> 	You should make it possible to do as much as possible without
> being forced to learn a lot of things.  There is a real shortage of
> people who know anything.  And this shortage will never go away, and
> trying to force people to learn things in order to do stuff won't help
> it at all.
> 
> 	Most people have other things they want to learn besides
> computer stuff.  Computer stuff is actually a small part of most
> people's lives.  Not saying that this is somehow better, it's just the
> way it is, and the way it always will be.
> 
> 	You have to entice people into learning computer things.  Make
> it easy to do things, but also easy to peek under the surface to find
> out how it's done.  Do as much as you can to allow the learning curve to
> be as shallow or as steep as people want it to be.
> 
> 	BASIC was popular because people immediately felt some sense of
> control.  Even if it was somewhat illusory, they had least had it within
> a certain framework.  That's what people need.  Don't hit them with a
> thousand acronyms and commands they have to learn.  Give them a neat
> tool that you can peek beneath the covers of.  If it doesn't do exactly
> what they want, they can spend a little effort and do some minor
> tweaking, or they can spend a lot of effort and get total control.
> 
> 	I would only want Ghost for Linux under these terms.  Have it
> use dd and friends to accomplish it's job.  Have it give enticing little
> tidbits about devices and drives and network stuff, but don't make it
> necessary to know these things to do basic tasks like stamping out a
> bunch of drives with identical stuff.
> 
> 	Make it easy for people to do stuff, and make it easy to learn
> how its done so if they want more control, they can get it.  Have as
> little in-your-face complexity as possible.  Computers should patiently
> teach people how they work.
> 
> Have fun (if at all possible),
> -- 
> Its name is Public Opinion.  It is held in reverence. It settles everything.
> Some think it is the voice of God.  Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet
> broke a chain or freed a human soul.     ---Mark Twain
> -- Eric Hopper (hopper@omnifarious.mn.org  http://omnifarious.mn.org/~hopper) --
>