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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.'"
Here is a Link to the print version of the article (that convenientily fits on 1 page instead of 3).
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.
A bad GUI with no CLI is the worst of both worlds, the author of the article got that right. The 80/20 rule applies: 80% of the work is common to everyone, and should be offered with a GUI. And the 20% that is custom to each sysadmin, well use the CLI.
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With a CLI or a script that's easy: it comes down to "log in as user X, change to directory Y, run script Z with arguments A B and C - the output should look like D". Try that when all you have is a GLUI (like a GUI, but you get stuck): open this window, select that option, drag a slider, check these boxes, click Yes, three times. The output might look a little like this blurry screen shot and the only record of a successful execution is a window that disappears as soon as the application ends.
I suppose the Linux community should be grateful that windows made the fundemental systems design error of making everything graphic. Without that basic failure, Linux might never have even got the toe-hold it has now.
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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.
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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.
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Without a GUI it will be hard to sell, but automation is next to impossible with GUIs, so they are expensive to use in the long run because you have to pay for more Users.
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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.
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Usually there will be resolv.conf.head and resolv.conf.tail files somewhere which get stuck at the beginning and end of the generated resolv.conf.
That way you get a semi-dynamic and semi-static config.
I have a cheap router with only a web gui. I wrote a two line bash script that simply POSTs the right requests to URL.
Simply put, HTTP interfaces, especially if they implement the right response codes, are actually very nice to script.
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Really? Ever heard of editing /etc/profile and changing the PATH statement there? No, there's no GUI tool- but under Windows it's not wholly clear like you make it out to be where it is. Yeah you can change it- but then so can I under Linux in as much of an easy way as you can under Windows- it's just different and if you're unfamiliar with one or the other, you're not going to be doing it on EITHER.
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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.
/etc/init.d/NetworkManager stop /etc/sysconfig/network /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/eth0
chkconfig NetworkManager off
chkconfig network on
vi
vi
At least they named it NetworkManager, so experienced admins could recognize it as a culprit. Anything named in CamelCase is almost invariably written by new school programmers who don't grok the Unix toolbox concept and write applications instead of tools, and the bloated drivel is usually best avoided.
Probably because it's also about the ease of troubleshooting issues.
How do you troubleshoot something with a GUI after you've misconfigured?
How do you troubleshoot a programming error (bug) in the GUI -> device communication?
How do you scale to tens, hundreds, or thousands of devices with a GUI?
CLI makes all this easier and more manageable.
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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...
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it's called a "core" install in Server 2008 and up, and if you do that, there is no going back, you can't ever add the GUI back.
What this means is you can run a small subset of MS services that don't need GUI interaction. With R2 that subset grew somwhat as they added the ability to install .Net too, which mean't you could run IIS in a useful manner (arguably the strongest reason to want to do this in the first place).
Still it's a one way trip and you better be damn sure what services need to run on that box for the lifetime of that box or you're looking at a reinstall. Most windows admins will still tell you the risk isn't worth it.
Simple things like network configuration without a GUI in windows is tedious, and, at least last time i looked, you lost the ability to trunk network poers because the NIC manufactuers all assumed you had a GUI to configure your NICs
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I don't think you really understand systems administration. 'Users,' or in this case admins, don't typically do stuff once. Furthermore, they need to know what he did and how to do it again (i.e. new server or whatever) or just remember what he did.
One-off stuff isn't common and is a sign of poor administration (i.e. tracking changes and following processes).
What I'm trying to get at is that admins shouldn't do anything without reading the manual. As a Windows/Linux admin, I tend to find Linux easier to properly administer because I either already know how to perform an operation or I have to read the manual (manpage) and learn a decent amount about the operation (i.e. more than click here/use this flag).
Don't get me wrong, GUIs can make unknown operations significantly easier, but they often lead to poor process management. To document processes, screenshots are typically needed. They can be done well, but I find that GUI documentation (created by admins, not vendor docs) tend to be of very low quality. They are also vulnerable to 'upgrades' where vendors change the interface design. CLI programs typically have more stable interfaces, but maybe that's just because they have been around longer...
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.)
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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.
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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.
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