Re: System administration with GNOME.

[Drazen Kacar <dave srce hr>]

Hassan Aurag wrote:

>  You have a point there, and a good one (gnome running on 
> linux+solaris+bsd). 

Yeah, but... Unix admin tools were never standardized and different
versions are hard to manage in a consistent way.

For the two examples Miguel posted and Solaris as a target OS:
a) you're not supposed to even think about changing the date on a running
   system. That's a single-user mode operation, ie. no X, no GNOME.
   (NTP works as usual.)
b) mailbox locking should be done by API which lives in libmail, ie.
   bindings for the selected scripting language should be written; I
   doubt they exist already. Determining which MTA runs the show is
   impossible in the general case. Sun supports only sendmail, but if
   something else was put in place there's no way to find out what.

>  But then this will be quite shitty to create unless one seriously 
> thinks about it in terms of design.

Indeed.

>  My take is:
> 
>  -Please no central configuration files. I hate registries.
>  -Use existing configuration tools, since all OS's have their own 
> usually text based stuff and in the worst case one can edit 
> configuration files by hand.

Ever seen AIX? You want to reimplement Smit. And config files are binary. :-)

Sun's new joke are Java based tools. Software packages are supposed to
be installed by GUI Java installers and deinstalled by GUI Java uninstallers.
The registry is binary and there are no CLI tools. It's built upon old
text based software registry, so old CLI tools would remove the files,
but Java things will still have them in the binary registry if you go that way.

>  -Make a central tool that 'ships' with the correct set of plugins a 
> la linuxconf. Allow plugins to be added. We could have plugins for 
> firewall, protsentries, device settings, apache.

There are 3 web servers on Solaris 8 CDs. Two of them have web based
configuration. The third one is Apache. It makes sense to have Apache
config tool, but which servers are active is... slightly hard to
determine.

>  -Like linuxconf, plug yourself in the init sequence, preferably at 
> the end so that we can reset stuff that might be misconfigured.

Uh-oh. Are you sure you want to do that? You could ruin perfectly
functional system. Suppose your config tool doesn't recognize various
Volume Managers (and it won't). Really want to mess with the disks?

-- 
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