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10 Dos and Don'ts To Make Sysadmins' Lives Easier

Posted by timothy on from the sorry-dave-can't-let-you-do-that dept.

CowboyRobot writes "Tom Limoncelli has a piece in 'Queue' summarizing the Computer-Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology's list of how to make software that is easy to install, maintain, and upgrade. FTA: '#2. DON'T make the administrative interface a GUI. System administrators need a command-line tool for constructing repeatable processes. Procedures are best documented by providing commands that we can copy and paste from the procedure document to the command line.'"

5 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. click-wall. by nblender · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Don't make me use a real browser to click all the way through your site, make me agree to a stupid set of conditions for using the software, and then provide my browser with a cookie that it can subsequently use to download your software; when my browser is on one continent and the machine that wants the software is on another continent; you ass-fucks...

  2. That's plain ASCII to you... by sl149q · · Score: 5, Insightful

    > DO have a configuration file that is an ASCII file, not a binary blob.

    And by ASCII we mean something that can be edited by any editor.

    XML is the equivalent of a binary blob when you are up to your ass in alligators trying to get things working again with minimal tools available.

  3. Re:#11: Meaningful error messages by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That reminds me of a Web Developer I once knew.

    He said he didn't bother putting try/catches around certain standard things (Like Database connection opening, closing, transactions, etc) - because if anything ever went wrong it was easier for the user to take a screenshot of the Stack Trace if and when it went wrong from the Webapp. Said it took too much time to build in proper exception handling and error messages.

    He said that the user experience basically means nothing if your application doesn't work, so when something doesn't work, don't bother making it pretty.

    He no longer works here, though I can't imagine why.

  4. Re:I disagree on the GUI by Qhartb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think it's more a matter of not making a GUI instead of a command line interface. Making both is, of course, perfectly fine, so long as the CLI is fully-featured and reasonably usable.

  5. #1 big dont by MrLint · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Do not assume that your software is running with elevated access... (root/administrator)