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

[Chewie <chewie@wookimus.net>]

Usability...  Wow, Chris.  That was quite a rant.  I would agree with you to a
point.  By your rant, you advocate the school of hard knocks for the sysadmins
and the lack of school for the lusers (since they don't really need to learn
how to do such things).  Let's not stray from the topic of origin, however,
which was the mass reproduction of a disk image to multiple networked
computers.

The job of a sysadmin is a painful one.  Not only are you the go-to guy for
every Tom, Dick, and Harry who has a printer problem, but you're in charge of
rolling out new software configured to a given environment, making sure the
network is configured correctly to provide that environment, scan access logs,
manage the email server, tweak performance in a number of aspects, and
basically hold everything together.  Then again, maybe that's just me, wearing
a ton of hats and seeing them as one.  

I've got very little time in a given day to be researching and testing new
tools while maintaining the existing ones.  Yes, you could argue that
it's all a matter of time management, but that is precicely the reason
tools like GHOST are created.  You've just spent 8 hours configuring a
workstation to the perfect setup.  All of the applications have the
correct configuration file, and you've automated the personalization
process so that everyone has a resonable environment when they first log
on to the new machine.  Now you've got some 200 workstations to roll
this out too (ok, about 8 times the number I have to manage, but I
wouldn't use GHOST either).  It may not be that you don't know what
you're doing, you just want to save time.  You sit down your Jr.
SysAdmin, the 15 year old part-time summer intern who doesn't know how
to blow his nose, let alone manage a system, at the workbench
workstation.  He immitates a chicken effectively, so you hired him to do
Windows and RedHat installs...and GHOST'ing disks.

Another scenario, one that Ben and I may find ourselves doing in the
near future.  You're hired on as a network/system consultant for a
school.  The only knowledgable computer person on site is the History
teacher, who is really a wonderful Windows user and part-time
administrator -- he's the one who set up the wonderful file sharing
rat's nest over 30 workstations.  The school hires you to install a
system that the students can't tamper with, that will protect both
student and staff data from vandalism, and one that is easy to manage
from one central location.  You decide that NFS, NIS, Sendmail,
StarOffice, Netscape, and Squid are in order, as well as all the fun
development tools for the Computer Science classes.  Each workstation is
identical, and students have been known to blow up the Windows systems
every once and a while.  A little paranoid, since you know kids are
wonderfully curious folk, capable of unforseen amounts of damage and
havoc, you want to install Linux on all the workstations.  You choose
RedHat or Debian and finish installing it on one of the workstations,
configuring it to perfection.  Why automate the process through
installation scripts if you can simply mirror the content of the drives
from one to the others?  You do just that, the hard way with 'find' and
'cpio' and many shutdown and reboots since you don't have hot-swap
disks

OK, everything works just fine now.  A month later, you get a call from
our friend, the History teacher, who reports that one of his CS student
geniuses had exploited a security hole in your perfectly set up systems
and managed to frag 50% of the computers (He was mad for having to take
a simple pascal class and thought he'd show his teachers what he could
REALLY do).  You're now stuck running back down to the site to reinstall
these workstations once again, 50% of them, which took you approximately
15 minutes per disk to begin with.  Now you were wishing you had a GHOST
like tool that could install systems from a tftp server or the like so
that you could perform the restore remotely, or a tool for our friend,
the teacher, to graphically set up a system reinstall on these
workstations with a few clicks of the mouse...

My point is, in all it's long-windedness, that there are times when a
GHOST utility would come in handy.  You should never box yourself in to
an idealist world where only sysadmins do sysadmin stuff, and lusers do
luser stuff.  The lines must cross at times, and when those times
happen, it'd be nice to have tools to make it as painless as possible.

-- 
^chewie

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