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

["Eric M. Hopper" <hopper@omnifarious.mn.org>]

On Tue, Mar 07, 2000 at 10:22:22AM -0600, Chris McKinley wrote:
> 
> Now as to the question of lusers using these tools, I have to ask why they 
> would be duplicating boxes like that.

	OEMs.  People who mass install Linux on thousands of boxes.  No,
there aren't any of those yet, but hopefully, someday there will be.

	Also, the company I work for.  We have nearly 100 identical
boxes on people's desks, and an initially identical image burned into
each one before it's stuck on someone's desk.

	No sysadmin wants to be stuck with work like that.  It's boring
as all get out.

> 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.

	*shrug* You can make all the jokes you want to about CD
cupholder people, but these are real, live people who have things they
want to do on a computer too.  In the heat of tech support, it may be
hard to believe that they can be in any way productive or useful, but
there they are.

	I don't know if you've tried this, but next time the Outlook
user has their problem, you might try explaining POP3 using as few
technical terms as possible.  Once they understand what's going on,
maybe they'll do the right thing.  I've actually had a lot of success
with this technique.

> 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.

	Ghost, if it existed, would be a crossover tool.  It would be
capable of being used by Eloi's to do Morlock-like things.  We are all
Eloi's and Morlocks in different areas of expertise.  I actually use,
and like many of the GUI configuration tools under RedHat because I
don't really want to be bothered to learn right now.  I have no doubt I
could figure it out, but sometimes I have more important things to
figure out.

	Yeah, the person may mess up when they use it, and do something
stupid.  Suddenly they'd be confronted with having to learn how things
really work.  It's that kind of thing that causes people to become
Morlocks.

	If you can arrange it so that people less 'in the know' can
successfully administrate UNIX, then you eliminate the 'shortage of
highly paid admin' fears that a lot of companies have.  Microsoft uses
that fear to generate a lot of misleading (and, in some ways, not so
misleading) TCO figures.

> 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.

	I didn't know about this tool.  If it's nice and friendly, and
easy to use to get some common things done, then it might be a reason
for Ghost not to be ported.  On the other hand, the more tools that are
ported, the better, even if they are eventually abandon.  Of course, it
may be counterproductive to convince a company to port a tool that we
know will be recieved very poorly, but I suspect Ghost would find some
immediate users in certain places.

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) --

PGP signature