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Take This GUI and Shove It
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia speaks out against the overemphasis on GUIs in today's admin tools, saying that GUIs are fine and necessary in many cases, but only after a complete CLI is in place, and that they cannot interfere with the use of the CLI, only complement it. Otherwise, the GUI simply makes easy things easy and hard things much harder. He writes, 'If you have to make significant, identical changes to a bunch of Linux servers, is it easier to log into them one-by-one and run through a GUI or text-menu tool, or write a quick shell script that hits each box and either makes the changes or simply pulls down a few new config files and restarts some services? And it's not just about conservation of effort — it's also about accuracy. If you write a script, you're certain that the changes made will be identical on each box. If you're doing them all by hand, you aren't.'"
If you write a script, you're certain that the changes made will be identical on each box.
One little mistake in the script and you fuck up the whole organization.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
I think the author might not fully understand who most admins are. They're people who couldn't write a shell script if their lives depended on it, because they've never had to. GUI-dependent users become GUI-dependent admins.
As a percentage of computer users, people who can actually navigate a CLI are an ever-diminishing group.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
What would be nice is if the GUI could automatically create a shell script doing the change. That way you could (a) learn about how to do it per CLI by looking at the generated shell script, and (b) apply the generated shell script (after proper inspection, of course) to other computers.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
There are more and more small businesses (5, 10 or so employees) realizing that they can get things done easier if they had a server. Because the business can't really afford to hire a sysadmin or a full-time tech person, its generally the employee who "knows computers" (you know, the person who has to help the boss check his e-mail every day, etc.) and since they don't have the knowledge of a skilled *Nix admin, a GUI makes their administration a lot easier.
So with the increasing use of servers among non-admins, it only makes sense for a growth in GUI-based solutions.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I find it rather disturbing the UNIX ideal that sysadmins should be programmers. The opinion seems to be that it is perfectly ok for someone to need to do a fair bit of programming work to solve a system problem. Ok but the thing is programming and systems administration are not identical skills any more than say being a musician and being a recording engineer are. They are related, but proficiency in one is not the same as the other. I know more than a few programmers that are abysmal at system administration, and I know sysadmins that can't program. There is nothing wrong with this.
While I realize a simple (emphasis on simple) script isn't quite the same thing, this attitude smacks of the "People should just get down and code what they need," thing. No, not really. Not everyone should have to learn that skill, and you could well be excluding people you want by requiring it.
Also there's the simple matter that GUIs work better for unfamiliar situations. While it might be easy to just say "Well a good admin should know about this," that is rather stupid. Nobody knows everything, you never get someone with limitless experience. Part of systems administration is being able to solve novel problems. Ok well GUIs help in that regard, at least when well designed. They show you your options, and how they flow, what ones exclude and influence others and so on. That can make it much faster to deal with something you are not familiar with. This is important and useful in real IT work.
They also can help prevent errors. For example I can't count the number of times our DNS has been temporarily broken by a student messing up the file. If you do the formatting incorrect, screw up the serial number, etc and suddenly things stop working (we have it in a versioning system so it can be undone easily, of course). In Windows? Not a problem. The GUI keeps you from screwing things up. You can still make a bad entry or whatever, but you can't go and break the entire server.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the command line, or that it should go away. However the idea that everything should be CLI based is silly.
That's one thing Microsoft did right with Exchange 2007. They built it entirely around their new powershell CLI and then built a GUI for it. The GUI is limited in compared to what you can do with the CLI, but you can get most things done. The CLI becomes extremely handy for batch jobs and exporting statistics to csv files. I'd say it's really up there with BASH in terms of scripting, data manipulation, and integration (not just Exchange but WMI, SQL, etc.)
They tried to do similar with Windows 2008 and their Core feature, but they still have to load a GUI to present a prompt...
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
Have you ever seen generated code?
Yes
You do not want to learn shell scripting from generated code...
IMO the generation process should be limited to taking the users input and "plugging it in" to a "template" command or short sequence of commands. If a process that is simple in the GUI is complex in the CLI then your system has a design fault.
It's not about teaching the user how to write complex scripts with lots of conditionals (manuals and tutorials are better for that). It's about teaching the users the command line equivalents of their GUI actions and hence creating a bridge between the "discoverability" of a GUI and the power and repeatability of a CLI.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
And to drive the point of this article home: how long would your post have been if you'd had to describe how to do this through the GUI? Would it have even been possible without screenshots?
Probably Debian would have been OK, but I was finding admin of most Linux distros a pain for exactly these reasons. I couldn't find a layer where I could do everything that I needed to do without worrying about one thing stepping on another. No doubt there are ways that I could manage a Linux system without running into different layers of management tools stepping on each other, but it was a struggle.
There were other reasons as well (although there is a lot that I miss about Linux), but I think that this was one of the leading reasons.
(NB: I realize that this is flamebait (I've got karma to burn), but that isn't my intention here.)
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
I think this is a stronger point than the OP: GUIs do not lead to good documentation. In fact, GUIs pretty much are limited to procedural documentation like the example you gave.
The best they can do as far as actual documentation, where the precise effect of all the widgets is explained, is a screenshot with little quote bubbles pointing to each doodad. That's a ridiculous way to document.
This is as opposed to a command reference which can organize, usually in a pretty sensible fashion, exact descriptions of what each command does.
Moreover, the GUI authors seem to have a penchant to find new names for existing CLI concepts. Even worse, those names are usually inappropriate vagueries quickly cobbled together in an off-the-cuff afterthought, and do not actually tell you where the doodad resides in the menu system. With a CLI, the name of the command or feature set is its location.
Not that even good command references are mandatory by today's pathetic standards. Even the big boys like Cisco have shown major degradation in the quality of their documentation during the last decade.
Someone had to do it.
Providing a great GUI for complex routers or Linux admin is hard. Of course there has to be a CLI, that's how pros get the job done. But a great GUI is one that teaches a new user to eventually graduate to using CLI.
Just about everyone reading this is heavily biased one way or another, and there is too much presumption that a CLI is this or a GUI is that.
Why can't we break this down into what makes any type of interface good or bad, and keep open to the possibility of new types of interfaces or better ways of implementing existing ones?
If we can bitch and moan about CLI vs. GUI with little choice in the matter I think the floor's open to made up interfaces too. These are qualities I think any computer interface should have.
Learning curve no steeper than the underlying concepts. Probably even lower.
Consistent, and predictable.
Expressive, and concise.
Integrity. Um.. as in, the state of the machine vs. what's conveyed to the user. Accurate?
Available over a network.
Can be automated.
Online documentation. Of the interface. If you have trouble describing the concepts in your native language, maybe it sucks.
Efficient, in the sense of labor involved, but in the sense of learning too, like my first rule.
That's a start anyway. I don't see why any kind of interface can't shoot for those. For sure if you're going to deliver more than one kind if interface they should relate to each other as much as possible. A CLI is dead simple to turn into script, but a GUI could also be. A CLI should map so closely to a corresponding GUI that it effectively IS a script of the GUI. A GUI should convey state information just by looking at it. Duh. If it doesn't HAVE to be an either/or situation, why make it into one?
What would be REALLY nice for you all router manufacturers who are using Linux underneath the hood is to give shell access so that we could gain full access to iptables, vpn and routing. Just about every one of these Linux-based routers has all that power locked up in your crappy web-based configuration tools that render them all but brain dead. Yeah, I know, there's DD-WRT and its various iterations, but these only work on a subset of Linux-based routers.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
> * It requires a sysadmin with a clue
> * You need to not be a mouth-breather to configure it
Still wonder why you're not taken seriously, eh?
I like Samba. It could use less advocates like you.
For sure if you're going to deliver more than one kind if interface they should relate to each other as much as possible.
Under this expanded mandate, let's also compare the programmatic interface to the system with the command and graphical interfaces. I've always been bothered that there isn't a tight relationship between the standard Unix command set and their programmatic equivalents. It's pretty accidental, and that's a shame. As long as the coupling is not rigorous, that means two learning curves as well as two compatibility surfaces to maintain.
I used to ponder this a lot, so it was very instructive to work with the Symbolics Lisp Machine for a few years. Here we had an environment which was Lisp from the microcode upward. It was a completely fresh start, a chance to do it right. The operating system was very open. And with Lisp being an interpreted language, you'd think it would be dead easy to provide a rich CLI that gave direct access to both the system and the GUI.
Well, no, that's not how it worked out. Part of that is due to our natural fondness for line breaks as command delimiters. Lisp wants things to be delimited by parentheses. But that's not an insurmountable problem. Unfortunately, the Symbolics developers thought it was, and they instead went off and built a CLI that was only vaguely coupled with the corresponding system methods. It was heartbreaking to see such a basic advantage thrown away.
To make matters worse, when the CLI ended up throwing an exception (which was not all that uncommon in such an experimental environment) what you saw on the stack bore little resemblance to the documented system methods. See, most of those were not really methods at all but wrapper macros of one kind or another. So, you'd execute a shell command, which would invoke one of these macros, which would push some undocumented methods on the stack. And since the CLI didn't relate to the system documentation, you'd have to guess where to go to find the documented methods.
It could have been the best. Instead it was kind of the worst. Well, I guess it beat looking at IBM core dumps.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
GUIs usually are a management requirement. The common misconception is that sysadmin GUIs make you more productive. Well, they don't. On the contrary, they slow you down, cause repetitive and boring activities where the human factor thrives (E.g. copy paste from spreadsheet.) GUIs look good on presentations but are crap to operate.
But it's not only the god forsaken Windows platform that has them. Ever tried configuring network interfaces and the DHCP server on OpenSolaris? Ever tried getting a readable manual on how to do either by editing files or through command line? That for me was the practical reason for discarding OpenSolaris and continuing with FreeBSD.
In an ideal world, configuration files adhere to a specific syntax. Libraries are available and convenience tools and utilities (CLI and GUI) should be based on them and are equally effective.
Cheerfully ignore comments stating that scripts for changing configuration files can screw up production. Hobbyists stating such manure apparently don't know you should run unit and integration tests before deploying any change whatsoever in a production environment. Nowadays any half professional organisation can afford multiple test environments to minimise production failures caused by untested software.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
You are not qualified to advise people on using Windows XP, Vista or 7 if your knowledge stops at Windows 98.
If I said Linux was a shitty desktop OS, because when I used it in 1998 the sound didn't work properly, everyone would just laugh.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it