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

[Chris McKinley <lamfada@lugh.net>]

OK, perhaps I strayed a bit from the topic at hand.  Allow me to address 
some of the points brought up, and maybe clarify where I see Ghost stand
WRT cpio.  

On Tue, 7 Mar 2000, Chewie wrote:

> 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.

Well, to a point I do advocate the school of hard knocks for admins.  While it
is very possible to learn quite a lot about tools and systems through 
experimentation, nothing compares to actually doing it "for real" with 
customers breathing down your neck, systems giving you strange errors, and the
sudden realization that that is really what that tool was designed to do ;).

On the other topic, I would love to have educated users.  Nevertheless, I 
believe that in order to be successful in their role, computers should be 
usable by almost anyone, with as close to zero knowledge required as possible.
But replicating systems is not an end user activity.  It is not the kind of
place to start learning, unless you are the junior admin, in which case that is
a completely appropriate excercise.  Enough for this thread.

> 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.  

Yes, you perform functions that are in larger installations performed by
several different groups.  Here at $VBC, I work for the UNIX admin group, and 
that is all we do.  There is a network group, a Level 1 and Level 2 help desk,
and applications groups which maintain their own software.  We manage DNS, 
sendmail, and a few other admin related apps.  We also have nothing to do with
anything Microsoft, except to use the Windows Term Server if we need to read
Word or Excel docs.  That is part of the joys and pains of $VBC, while you
expressed the joys and pains of working for $VSC, I would guess.

> 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.

One of the joys of working for $VBC is that you have to write procedures to 
share knowledge of how to install workstations, servers and apps.  Coming from
that background, I would tend to hand $INTERN a procedure and tell them to come
to me with questions.  One of the benefits of procedures, especially if a 
non-nose-blower can do them, is that if you get run over by a bus, someone else
can take over.  This can get excessive, though. 

> <snip> hypothetical situation <snip>

Well, you intimate that this duplication requires physically moving disks 
around.  In neither case, Ghost or cpio, would you be required to do this.  
Ghost can do this over a network, including multicast, which is a way cool
feature.  If this were going to be a regular proposition, by all means, 
Ghost!  Either that or use the RH utility to manage enterprise installs.  
IMHO, either one would work well, with the RH utility winning for flexibility
and ease of upgradability, since you do not have to reimage to distribute
updated binaries.  The cpio solution can be solved by nfs mounting and using
boot / root floppies to initiate the install.  I freely admit that this is 
somewhat more cumbersome than Ghost, mainly because of the front-end work
involved.  But if you are not going to do this very often, and are budget
strapped, as in the "hyptothetical" situation above, the extra time spent in
setting this up could pay off later.  Remember that if you start buying 
products, you will most likely continue to buy them, especially if they have
new features that you will use (ext2 partition resizing for Ghost is an
example). 

> 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.

Well, in an idealist world, we would all be able to do our own admin work, fix
our own cars, diagnose and treat our own illnesses, etc., but in the real 
world, we hand things over to specialists when they get too complex.  Even in
the systems world, for example we have a 3 drive, 200 tape tape library, and
according to the software vendor, they have someone who can come out and spend
forty hours to enable this one feature of some kind of specialized drive 
spanning / dedication. 

To tell the truth, I am kind of divided on the issue, anyway.  On the one hand,
one should attempt to utilize the tools provided.  OTOH, one should attempt to
use the best tool for the job.  Ghost may eventually be the best tool, and in
some ways it may already be the best tool, but unless the cost allows or the 
time constraints justify, I believe the existing tools are more than capable
of doing the job.  The only thing I do not know for sure that Ghost does is
support device special files, which i know that cpio does.

I apologize if my earlier rant offended anyone.

-Chris