Graphical admin tools (or the lack thereof)

Posted Nov 10, 2006 15:18 UTC (Fri) by dps (guest, #5725)
Parent article: Review: Linux Administration Handbook, Second Edition

I set up and administer several seriously minimised linux systems, including one firewall and several bastion hosts. These systems simply do not have graphical admin tools or many of their requirements installed.

Anything within a mile radius of X11 is definiely not installed. Even curses is a little dubious, unless you can prove I should install it for some reason. Text editors either absent or limited to vi.

There are very few graphical admin tools that can cope with those servers. An admin tools which requires somethine else extra, except ip tables and ssh, is unlikely to be installed. I would like to implement selinux but have had insufficient time to do so.

Graphical admin tools (or the lack thereof)

Posted Nov 10, 2006 20:10 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

This is your choice. However installing the required X client libraries (which are not big) and running and X client (say, over ssh) from the remote host on your local desktop is not really a problem, and not a major overhead.

Graphical admin tools (or the lack thereof)

Posted Dec 4, 2006 11:09 UTC (Mon) by hein.zelle (guest, #33324) [Link]

I fully agree, it's the system administrators choice not to install such software. I for one don't see why a secure system couldn't have any other editors installed than vi - unless there are severe space limitations. I personally always install emacs on any server, simply because I make less editing mistakes when modifying important config files. That alone makes it more secure for my server than only having vi installed. The added convenience is a whole extra story.

What is the reasoning behind not installing curses?