It's rare to actually have to log in directly to a server unless you have one-off apps running on it which, in turn, tend to be command line friendly and therefore GUI friendly for an able programmer.
How do you troubleshoot something with a GUI after you've misconfigured?
Read the error logs and re-configure it.
How do you troubleshoot a programming error (bug) in the GUI -> device communication?
Read the error logs and harass the vendor for a fix. You're not advocating re-writing the app are you? Daaamn you've got some time on your hands!
How do you scale to tens, hundreds, or thousands of devices with a GUI?
Ctrl-A. Just kidding. This is the job for a script, which is a whole different beast. Bash and Powershell do alright as command line scripting options, but really what you want is a dedicated scripting language for this sort of thing.
...but frankly I've never understood how typing cd ~/Desktop/ToBeInstalled/GIMP/Docs/ is supposed to be more efficient than pointing and clicking four times with a mouse?
Apparently you've also never understood how the tab key works in any OS CLI for at least the last decade, either.
If you're familiar with your task, there is absolutely nothing faster than the CLI. If your task is not familiar, however, it can be torture. That's the real tradeoff between CLI and GUI - familiar, repetative tasks can be several orders of magnitude faster in a CLI, but unfamiliar tasks can be orders of magnitude slower (until the start to become familiar, of course).
This is why highly experienced admins tend to prefer the CLI over the GUI (regardless of the OS, Linux just forces you into it where Windows doesn't), whereas inexperienced admins will hunt the GUI until they find it. If they're smart, they'll then find out how they can do the same thing in the CLI.
All you need for that is a normal Windows PC, the admin tools can be installed on any Windows machine. A second server is not necessary. You can also run most server command line commands remotely as well.
Frankly, most of the GP's issues are bullshit. How is netsh harder to use than any Linux config tool? And all the major windows services run without the GUI. They have gui tools to manage them, but the services themselves are completely GUI-free..Net can be installed without a GUI if you have a basic understanding of MSI command line switches (granted, MS is no help there, they pop them up in a message box instead of at the command prompt), and that has been possible since.net was released.
Really, the only thing I'll give him a slight bit of credit for is NIC trunking. Windows doesn't have a built-in config (command line or gui) for that, so if your NIC manufacturer is a dipshit that didn't think about remote configuration options, then you should probably not buy NICs from them. It shows incredible lack of forethought. Even then, big names like Dell and HP have complete remote configuration packages that do not even require you be at the machine you're managing, let alone using the Windows GUI.
The last Microsoft product I bought was Windows 98, so I have mercifully missed the whole disaster since then.
Are you kidding? 98 was a nightmare compared to XP. My latest experience with Linux (about a year ago I gave it up) fell somewhere between 98 and XP. In other words, I'd gladly take Linux over 98, but I'll take XP over Linux any day. Vista sucked at launch, but by SP2 was better than XP (the reputation was destroyed, however, and rightly so). I'd take 7 over the lot. OSX it's hard to say, I've only had limited experience with it but that experience has generally been good. I hate Apple on principle though, so it's out.
Powershell has been around for half a decade now, you are out of the loop man. Did you say you're supporting Windows users but don't use Windows yourself? I feel sorry for your clients then, one generally expects intimate knowledge of a system from their service professionals.
You can do almost anything from the command line in Windows, in fact I can't think of anything off the top of my head that MS doesn't have a tool for. They often don't install the tools by default, but I would hope even a bad Windows admin knows about the admin tools and where to get them.
For example, you can manage the entire AD domain with the netdom command. Everything from adding new DCs, creating trusts, promoting/demoting servers, adding/removing accounts/groups, adding/removing machines, dhcp, dns, you name it.
Now, a GUI application often won't have a CLI option under the same executable, but that doesn't mean the tools are not available or any less functional than their GUI equivalents, and they are all script friendly.
On top of that, WMI objects provide complete control over the system if you are well versed in them. That's the way to go if you are doing more intensive scripting. They can be intimidating though, because they touch literally everything in the OS.
Cisco's IOS gui tools do the same thing, it's pretty slick. Of course, IOS is much simpler than a full server CLI, but the system is beautifully simple and intuitive.
Best CLI ever, at least that I've used. I've often wished the windows or linux CLI was as easy to use.
Come on, everybody knows Linux-based software is rock solid at the alpha stage! It's equivalent to a mature, proven Windows software package by then, it's the best ever!
Besides, what good Linux admin doesn't put alpha software in a sensitive production environment?;)
...which is in itself generally too unstable for production use once you pass a few hundred users.
An n=1 counter is not going to disprove that argument, sorry pal.
Also, are you the guy who designed that system? I'd wager you're not. More than likely the guy who did really knew his shit, and was able to mitigate the weaknesses of OpenLDAP.
If you are the guy who did it, then my apologies. You're one lucky bastard.
Cisco's GUI's do this, it's pretty slick. All changes made in the GUI correspond to an IOS command, and it generally shows you the commands it produced. You then have the option to push the changes to the router/switch, or copy/paste the text into another router manually.
Of course, Cisco's IOS is made for this - no scripting is necessary usually. Just paste a list of commands into the command prompt and they'll all execute. Then of course they have tools to push all of these command sets out to devices en-masse.
Getting off topic here now, but I wish more CLI's were like IOS. It's the easiest CLI I've ever used, and the only one I'd call intuitive.
Re:Good study, would have preferred a more diverse
on
Analyzing CAPTCHAs
·
· Score: 1
Design your own study then. Sounds like you know just what needs to be done.
The GP's point was that there are captchas out there that are very difficult for even human readers to understand. However, pattern recognition software is getting better all the time, while human pattern recognition is generally fixed (It's phenomenal, but not improving). Eventually pattern recognition software will overtake the human pattern recognition ability, and then the only ones who will be able to past a captcha is a bot.
Same here, I spent 15 minutes trying to get one to work the other day, but the letters were so messed up and the words so nonsensical that I couldn't manage it. So I tried the audio option. Makes sense right? Just listen to the words and it'll be easy! Except the audio was so fucked I couldn't understand it.
I managed to get in eventually, but I'm avoiding that website from now on.
Oddly enough, I think it was Jay Leno (could be wrong) complaining about how car manuals are nothing but 80 pages of warnings rather than content which you could use to operate/repair your vehicle.
I don't see why this would be odd, anybody who has read a car magazine in the last decade or so has probably read an article by or about Jay Leno - he's a huge car buff with a huge car collection, and as far as I know prefers to work on his cars himself. He is exactly the kind of person who would despise warning labels all over his beautiful cars.
No, in 20 years his lungs will have given out, or his stomach ceases to function, or his intestines fail, or his large arteries collapse.
A pump that lasts 20 years is trivial, and medical devices are generally of extremely high quality, so you can bet your ass that pump isn't going to wear out in 20 years.
Instead of his heart failing at fifteen, something else will fail at 35. That's what it means. It's permanent, and it's going to extend his life by 20 years.
It's the boy who is going to wear out by then, not the pump.
What it basically means is that now it won't be his heart that kills him.
It'll be his lungs, or his intestines, or his stomach, or what have you.
His disease is not limited to his heart, it degenerates all the muscles in his body at the same time. The heart is simply the most critical piece, and was therefore nearing critical failure faster than anything else.
The boy is still not going to get a full life unless a cure is found. However, since he doesn't have his heart to worry about any more, he can expect another 25 years or so before he finally succumbs.
Seriously, it's powered by an external battery, and they are more than capable of making small pumps that will last 50+ years. The limiting factor is obviously not the pump wearing out.
Slashdot Mirror
GUI on the admin side, not the server side. Duh.
It's rare to actually have to log in directly to a server unless you have one-off apps running on it which, in turn, tend to be command line friendly and therefore GUI friendly for an able programmer.
How do you troubleshoot something with a GUI after you've misconfigured?
Read the error logs and re-configure it.
How do you troubleshoot a programming error (bug) in the GUI -> device communication?
Read the error logs and harass the vendor for a fix. You're not advocating re-writing the app are you? Daaamn you've got some time on your hands!
How do you scale to tens, hundreds, or thousands of devices with a GUI?
Ctrl-A. Just kidding. This is the job for a script, which is a whole different beast. Bash and Powershell do alright as command line scripting options, but really what you want is a dedicated scripting language for this sort of thing.
...but frankly I've never understood how typing cd ~/Desktop/ToBeInstalled/GIMP/Docs/ is supposed to be more efficient than pointing and clicking four times with a mouse?
Apparently you've also never understood how the tab key works in any OS CLI for at least the last decade, either.
If you're familiar with your task, there is absolutely nothing faster than the CLI. If your task is not familiar, however, it can be torture. That's the real tradeoff between CLI and GUI - familiar, repetative tasks can be several orders of magnitude faster in a CLI, but unfamiliar tasks can be orders of magnitude slower (until the start to become familiar, of course).
This is why highly experienced admins tend to prefer the CLI over the GUI (regardless of the OS, Linux just forces you into it where Windows doesn't), whereas inexperienced admins will hunt the GUI until they find it. If they're smart, they'll then find out how they can do the same thing in the CLI.
All you need for that is a normal Windows PC, the admin tools can be installed on any Windows machine. A second server is not necessary. You can also run most server command line commands remotely as well.
Frankly, most of the GP's issues are bullshit. How is netsh harder to use than any Linux config tool? And all the major windows services run without the GUI. They have gui tools to manage them, but the services themselves are completely GUI-free. .Net can be installed without a GUI if you have a basic understanding of MSI command line switches (granted, MS is no help there, they pop them up in a message box instead of at the command prompt), and that has been possible since .net was released.
Really, the only thing I'll give him a slight bit of credit for is NIC trunking. Windows doesn't have a built-in config (command line or gui) for that, so if your NIC manufacturer is a dipshit that didn't think about remote configuration options, then you should probably not buy NICs from them. It shows incredible lack of forethought. Even then, big names like Dell and HP have complete remote configuration packages that do not even require you be at the machine you're managing, let alone using the Windows GUI.
The point is generally moot.
No, you don't.
You've obviously never used Windows Administrator Tools.
Sheer lack of knowledge does that.
Most all good GUIs do.
Bad GUIs don't, much like bad scripts are horribly obfuscated and completely undecipherable.
Oh god please tell me you are not actually trying to administer a live environment without a test environment!
How would he know? He doesn't use Windows, and only listens to Windows problems experienced by those who also don't use Windows.
The last Microsoft product I bought was Windows 98, so I have mercifully missed the whole disaster since then.
Are you kidding? 98 was a nightmare compared to XP. My latest experience with Linux (about a year ago I gave it up) fell somewhere between 98 and XP. In other words, I'd gladly take Linux over 98, but I'll take XP over Linux any day. Vista sucked at launch, but by SP2 was better than XP (the reputation was destroyed, however, and rightly so). I'd take 7 over the lot. OSX it's hard to say, I've only had limited experience with it but that experience has generally been good. I hate Apple on principle though, so it's out.
Powershell has been around for half a decade now, you are out of the loop man. Did you say you're supporting Windows users but don't use Windows yourself? I feel sorry for your clients then, one generally expects intimate knowledge of a system from their service professionals.
You can do almost anything from the command line in Windows, in fact I can't think of anything off the top of my head that MS doesn't have a tool for. They often don't install the tools by default, but I would hope even a bad Windows admin knows about the admin tools and where to get them.
For example, you can manage the entire AD domain with the netdom command. Everything from adding new DCs, creating trusts, promoting/demoting servers, adding/removing accounts/groups, adding/removing machines, dhcp, dns, you name it.
Now, a GUI application often won't have a CLI option under the same executable, but that doesn't mean the tools are not available or any less functional than their GUI equivalents, and they are all script friendly.
On top of that, WMI objects provide complete control over the system if you are well versed in them. That's the way to go if you are doing more intensive scripting. They can be intimidating though, because they touch literally everything in the OS.
Cisco's IOS gui tools do the same thing, it's pretty slick. Of course, IOS is much simpler than a full server CLI, but the system is beautifully simple and intuitive.
Best CLI ever, at least that I've used. I've often wished the windows or linux CLI was as easy to use.
Come on, everybody knows Linux-based software is rock solid at the alpha stage! It's equivalent to a mature, proven Windows software package by then, it's the best ever!
Besides, what good Linux admin doesn't put alpha software in a sensitive production environment? ;)
...which is in itself generally too unstable for production use once you pass a few hundred users.
An n=1 counter is not going to disprove that argument, sorry pal.
Also, are you the guy who designed that system? I'd wager you're not. More than likely the guy who did really knew his shit, and was able to mitigate the weaknesses of OpenLDAP.
If you are the guy who did it, then my apologies. You're one lucky bastard.
Cisco's GUI's do this, it's pretty slick. All changes made in the GUI correspond to an IOS command, and it generally shows you the commands it produced. You then have the option to push the changes to the router/switch, or copy/paste the text into another router manually.
Of course, Cisco's IOS is made for this - no scripting is necessary usually. Just paste a list of commands into the command prompt and they'll all execute. Then of course they have tools to push all of these command sets out to devices en-masse.
Getting off topic here now, but I wish more CLI's were like IOS. It's the easiest CLI I've ever used, and the only one I'd call intuitive.
Design your own study then. Sounds like you know just what needs to be done.
Are you implying that his redundant adjective is redundant?
The GP's point was that there are captchas out there that are very difficult for even human readers to understand. However, pattern recognition software is getting better all the time, while human pattern recognition is generally fixed (It's phenomenal, but not improving). Eventually pattern recognition software will overtake the human pattern recognition ability, and then the only ones who will be able to past a captcha is a bot.
Same here, I spent 15 minutes trying to get one to work the other day, but the letters were so messed up and the words so nonsensical that I couldn't manage it. So I tried the audio option. Makes sense right? Just listen to the words and it'll be easy! Except the audio was so fucked I couldn't understand it.
I managed to get in eventually, but I'm avoiding that website from now on.
What do you mean? In 1996, everything was a potential security vulnerability.
Oddly enough, I think it was Jay Leno (could be wrong) complaining about how car manuals are nothing but 80 pages of warnings rather than content which you could use to operate/repair your vehicle.
I don't see why this would be odd, anybody who has read a car magazine in the last decade or so has probably read an article by or about Jay Leno - he's a huge car buff with a huge car collection, and as far as I know prefers to work on his cars himself. He is exactly the kind of person who would despise warning labels all over his beautiful cars.
They don't have to play it up, it's entirely accurate: technically the boy is now a cyborg. Simple as that.
In fact, people with pacemakers and artificial hips are technically cyborgs, too.
I'd freak out even more if I were going to die because my heart was gradually eating itself.
Perspective, man, perspective!
No, in 20 years his lungs will have given out, or his stomach ceases to function, or his intestines fail, or his large arteries collapse.
A pump that lasts 20 years is trivial, and medical devices are generally of extremely high quality, so you can bet your ass that pump isn't going to wear out in 20 years.
Instead of his heart failing at fifteen, something else will fail at 35. That's what it means. It's permanent, and it's going to extend his life by 20 years.
It's the boy who is going to wear out by then, not the pump.
What it basically means is that now it won't be his heart that kills him.
It'll be his lungs, or his intestines, or his stomach, or what have you.
His disease is not limited to his heart, it degenerates all the muscles in his body at the same time. The heart is simply the most critical piece, and was therefore nearing critical failure faster than anything else.
The boy is still not going to get a full life unless a cure is found. However, since he doesn't have his heart to worry about any more, he can expect another 25 years or so before he finally succumbs.
Seriously, it's powered by an external battery, and they are more than capable of making small pumps that will last 50+ years. The limiting factor is obviously not the pump wearing out.