On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 9:21 PM, Konstantin Olchanski
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 10:55:33AM -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:
>> On Thursday, June 09, 2011 07:21:29 PM you wrote:
>> > The curses based, text compatible system-config-network needs
>> > everything a typical desktop or server needs. It lacks some of the
>> > foofiness of NetworkManager, but that's both unnecessary and dangerous
>> > on a stable desktop or server, as we've seen happen repeatedly for new
>> > installations of RHEL based systems over the last 5 years or so.
>>
>> Heh.  Why would you want to stick with such an old codebase, Nico?
>
>
> I think the wrong question was asked and a different wrong question was answered.
>
> One issue is GUI vs TUI.
>
> Gui is okey when you are standing in front of the computer
> console and the X11 graphics are working and you have a working monitor
> of reasonable size.

And a network connection needing attention is very likely to disable
the X services, especially for remote X servers.

> If you are not standing in front of the computer, you have to tunnel
> X11 graphics through an ssh tunnel. Okey for a computer in the office
> next door, but good luck doing this through a trans-Atlantic
> or trans-Pacific link. (You say "use VNC!", well good luck getting
> a VNC connection to a computer behind a firewall on the other side
> of a VPN connection. Hint - it can be done by tunneling a reverse
> connection (server to client) through an ssh tunnel).

Oh, my, you've brought back laughs. I wrote one of the early VNC
ports, to SunOS 4.1.x. Yeah, it's fun to get that working
internationally or over a messed up network. I've been encouraging a
switch to NX from www.nomachine.com, to save money on X servers and
get a much better connection than VNC provides.

> On my side, I have the instructions for setting up new computers
> written up on a web page. I want to be able to cut-and-paste them
> to a command line, so "authconfig --enablenis --nisdomain xxx --update" is cool,
> but "run system-config-users, then push these buttons with mouse" is not cool.

Now, *THAT* is when it's nice to have a Windows box with a remote
serial connection or, if the network is working well, and SSH session.
And yeah, being able to configure such settings in an init script or
as part of a system update is also prize, especially for clusters or
scattered servers.