Alvaro Ortega : Now that we all are running fancy desktops full of powerful applications [LWN.net]

Alvaro Ortega : Now that we all are running fancy desktops full of powerful applications

Posted Mar 3, 2011 10:31 UTC (Thu) by roblucid (subscriber, #48964)
Parent article: Quotes of the week

"Now that we all are running fancy desktops full of powerful applications.. what sense does it make to have to open a terminal window, become root, and edit a text file, and type a new command to reload the service in order to make a little change on how your web server behaves."

What about the guys, installing and supporting this powerfull software applications across 100's of desktops, or wanting reliable replicated servers?

It makes no sense to diddle about in a GUI on 100's of machines, when you can write a script once to edit a config file, and reload the service remotely and have it automatically distributed.

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Alvaro Ortega : Now that we all are running fancy desktops full of powerful applications

Posted Mar 3, 2011 21:35 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

It probably has less to do with GUI-ness then automation, security, and sanity checking. GUI is part of it usually, but not necessarily.

For example....

With Libvirt I can use GUI front ends, but I can also use 'virsh' to control it.

I use the GUI for common everything stuff, but for advanced features or unusual configurations I need to edit configurations by hand:

virsh dumpxml vm-name > vm-name.xml
vi vm-name.xml
virsh define vm-name.xml

I don't need to be on the local machine either. I can use ssh or SSL/TLS to provide remote access to that particular service. I don't need to be root, nor does it really depend on me being able to know the IP address or DNS name or whatever. It can be configured ahead of time by some other person and it can just be my job to manage the VMs.

The libvirtd does sanity checking on the xml files that get uploaded and, ideally, prevents typos and mis configurations from taking down important virtual machines or screwing up other machines.

This sort of thing is good. It works on a local standalone node, or it can scale across hundreds of machines effectively. Makes scripting easier. It can be used to delegate responsibilities to individuals, control access, help keep audit trails, and all sorts of other fun stuff. Delegation and specialization is important part of managing systems in a large organization.

The GUI is just part of it.

Flat text files are indeed very simple and relatively easy to deal with as long as they are documented well. The problem is that they don't work very well in complex environments and dynamic setups. At least not by themselves. You need other mechanisms to be able to solve problems like race conditions (as a example). The other problem is lack of uniformity. It's really difficult to write a script or a program that can deal with all the differences methods and formats that different Linux services use.

Makes automation very difficult and automation is the key to scalability and correctness. Without it your stuck with a very labor intensive and error prone processes. Going "cd /etc/ ; sudo vi foo/blah.cfg; service restart foo" is simple, but it is not terribly useful when dealing with 400-500 nodes... nor is it pleasant when its a configuration change that commonly happens on your desktop or laptop (such as giving a WPA password to a new network when your travelling).

Alvaro Ortega : Now that we all are running fancy desktops full of powerful applications

Posted Mar 5, 2011 20:36 UTC (Sat) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]

The part I find best about editing files is the permanence. When you edit a configuration is a file you know it'll be there next boot.

On the other hand, most GUI tools don't even try to explain. This setting you're changing, is it just for this session or forever? When I change the volume on my computer it seems to remember this across boots. There's no distinction between defaults after booting and what you want the settings to be now.

That said, I'm not sure if there's a nice solution for this. Which brings you right back to: when you edit a file, you knows it's forever.

Alvaro Ortega : Now that we all are running fancy desktops full of powerful applications

Posted Mar 21, 2011 17:41 UTC (Mon) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

Reliable you say... while posting a comment at the linked blog, got:

500 Internal Server Error
Cherokee web server 1.2, Port 80

I'd expect a bit better of ex-"Technical Lead en Sun Microsystems, High Performance / High Availability Engineer en Espanix", frankly. And FWIW the comment was:

---
"Id say that none, none at all" -- if that would be the case, then typing all those letterses into scripts making up those very webapps would make no sense either. Folks might as well just do everything by hand in those pesky desktop applications not suited for any sane automation... but you were just trolling cheap, right? ;-)

BTW there is already apsstandard.org -- hope it's not news to folks over there.
---

Groundless Hype?

Posted Apr 6, 2011 11:53 UTC (Wed) by Pierre@G-WAN (guest, #74111) [Link]

And it's not like if Cherokee resolved the problem: it STILL uses opaque configuration files.

By contrast, G-WAN is much faster (without *any* configuration file):

http://gwan.ch/imgs/gwan_nginx_cherokee.png

Cherokee might rock... but maybe in another area:

http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/182/cheroke...

Oh, and before we are (again) censored by Cherokee fan boys (like on Wikipedia*), here are the "Cherokee, the fastest Web server" facts checked by an independent source:

http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/apache-vs-nginx-v...

Pierre.

(*): http://forum.gwan.com/index.php?p=/discussion/comment/150...