What about the command line? [LWN.net]

What about the command line?

Posted Feb 27, 2003 15:57 UTC (Thu) by bkw1a (subscriber, #4101)
Parent article: Giving Root to the Web

About web-based admin interfaces, the article says "for remotely-hosted
servers it's pretty much essential". Around here, I manage about a
hundred Linux boxes remotely, without any web interface. For tweaking
individual machines, I use ssh. This lets me do anything I want to
do on the remote system, and unlike a web interface it doesn't require
that the interface change whenever a config file format changes.

For making changes to many machines at once, I have a nightly automatic
update system based on perl scripts, rsync and anon. ftp. I'd hate to
have to update all my machines individually, using web interfaces.

It seems to me that web-base admin interfaces for Linux fill a very
narrow niche: they suit people who administer only a few remote
machines, don't have time to really learn about Linux, and never
need to make big changes. Maybe this group is growing, though,
as more folks from the Windows world start administering, e.g.,
apache on Linux.

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What about the command line?

Posted Feb 28, 2003 10:03 UTC (Fri) by beejaybee (guest, #1581) [Link]

"For making changes to many machines at once, I have a nightly automatic
update system based on perl scripts, rsync and anon. ftp."

Oh brother. Given you have ssh anyway, why not use scp instead of anon ftp?

"It seems to me that web-base admin interfaces for Linux fill a very
narrow niche: they suit people who administer only a few remote
machines, don't have time to really learn about Linux, and never
need to make big changes. Maybe this group is growing, though,
as more folks from the Windows world start administering, e.g.,
apache on Linux."

Also the large group of people who administer things like network switches, network-connected printers etc. without thinking of themselves as system administrators (or being paid as such!) and without even realising that the device(s) they're administering has an underlying operating system.