Compare ClearOS with Zentyal
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@guyinpv said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
Can someone please tell me, then, what is the best unified interface to manage a server and its various used services?
Do I just hodgepodge around 15 different potential single-purpose GUIs? Stick strictly with CLI? Or is there a decent and capable unified interface or not?
It depends on what you are trying to do. For Windows I use the management interface that was designed for the task, or Powershell. I am using Powershell more and more. For Linux server I am 100% CLI. Easier, faster and much friendlier then a GUI providing you have some experience with it.
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@coliver said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
@guyinpv said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
Can someone please tell me, then, what is the best unified interface to manage a server and its various used services?
Do I just hodgepodge around 15 different potential single-purpose GUIs? Stick strictly with CLI? Or is there a decent and capable unified interface or not?
For Linux server I am 100% CLI. Easier, faster and much friendlier then a GUI providing you have some experience with it.
I could never agree to that sentiment. Anybody who thinks typing obscure commands and memorizing endless switches over simple point-n-click GUI and text boxes, it either part cyborg, or fooling themselves. lol
The only way I could ever work in "CLI only" is by having another computer available at all times so I can look up commands and how exactly to type stuff! Because man pages suck, and nothing is intuitive whatsoever!
I left DOS a long time ago and never looked back. Staring at a CLI is like looking into the abyss! I wish I could do it, but no matter how hard I try, my brain doesn't like it. -
@guyinpv said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
Can someone please tell me, then, what is the best unified interface to manage a server and its various used services?
Do I just hodgepodge around 15 different potential single-purpose GUIs? Stick strictly with CLI? Or is there a decent and capable unified interface or not?
Well.... CLI I think is the best, if you really want to talk about which is the best. Not saying it is the only, only that it is the best. The least to go wrong, scales the best. Most uniform and lasts the longest.
Single purpose GUIs are sometimes teh answer, that's how Microsoft does it and it works well. A single GUI just doesn't work because everyone needs something else in it. There is a reason that unified GUIs just aren't a real thing in any significant way in systems administration. It's a great idea, but not one that people are really doing. Webmin is the closest that we've seen, but for scale the world mostly moved to things like Ansible and Chef.
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@guyinpv said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
I could never agree to that sentiment. Anybody who thinks typing obscure commands and memorizing endless switches over simple point-n-click GUI and text boxes, it either part cyborg, or fooling themselves. lol
Except lots of us do it and I've never seen a GUI admin of any platform handle 600+ servers alone. But for CLI people, it's generally trivial. Or doable, at least.
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@guyinpv said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
@coliver said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
@guyinpv said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
Can someone please tell me, then, what is the best unified interface to manage a server and its various used services?
Do I just hodgepodge around 15 different potential single-purpose GUIs? Stick strictly with CLI? Or is there a decent and capable unified interface or not?
For Linux server I am 100% CLI. Easier, faster and much friendlier then a GUI providing you have some experience with it.
I could never agree to that sentiment. Anybody who thinks typing obscure commands and memorizing endless switches over simple point-n-click GUI and text boxes, it either part cyborg, or fooling themselves. lol
The only way I could ever work in "CLI only" is by having another computer available at all times so I can look up commands and how exactly to type stuff! Because man pages suck, and nothing is intuitive whatsoever!
I left DOS a long time ago and never looked back. Staring at a CLI is like looking into the abyss! I wish I could do it, but no matter how hard I try, my brain doesn't like it.I'm looking at this from basically the beginning of my career. I don't see systems administration being a one-off system on a local VM in the next few years. Management with a GUI doesn't make sense when you scale up. Learning Powershell, and the Linux CLI, will go a long way to making me more competitive when the time comes. Tab completion, and many other time savers, makes remembering commands much easier then looking through a GUI for me
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@guyinpv said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
The only way I could ever work in "CLI only" is by having another computer available at all times so I can look up commands and how exactly to type stuff! Because man pages suck, and nothing is intuitive whatsoever!
I'm not sure what you mean. I find it very intuitive. much moreso that the Windows GUI, for example. Not knocking the Windows GUI, just saying that that is a good one and I find it much harder to find things there than on the Linux CLI.
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@coliver said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
I'm looking at this from basically the beginning of my career. I don't see systems administration being a one-off system on a local VM in the next few years. Management with a GUI doesn't make sense when you scale up. Learning Powershell, and the Linux CLI, will go a long way to making me more competitive when the time comes.
I'll agree with @guyinpv here. This is getting less common but isn't going to go away. Needing a good way to admin a lot of stuff on one box will remain. I don't like it, but it will stick around.
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@guyinpv said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
Do I just hodgepodge around 15 different potential single-purpose GUIs? Stick strictly with CLI? Or is there a decent and capable unified interface or not?
One of the reasons that we would lean towards different tools is because we would normally run a separate system for each of those services. So you'd need to connect to 15 different machines already.
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@scottalanmiller said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
@guyinpv said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
The only way I could ever work in "CLI only" is by having another computer available at all times so I can look up commands and how exactly to type stuff! Because man pages suck, and nothing is intuitive whatsoever!
I'm not sure what you mean. I find it very intuitive. much moreso that the Windows GUI, for example. Not knocking the Windows GUI, just saying that that is a good one and I find it much harder to find things there than on the Linux CLI.
Well you are a victim of your experience and knowledge then!
How is a blank screen with a blinking cursor "intuitive"? No person on earth could be put in front of that and somehow just know what to do. But at least with a GUI there is something to look at, pieces of text, descriptions, help bubbles, search bars, text labels.
Most of the commands I've ever needed to do something relatively trivial have been just disgusting to look at. I mean, try something like, find the largest 10 files on your computer. Is it "intuitive" to just know how to type something like
du -a / | sort -n -r | head -n 10or whatever. What's intuitive about that? How would anybody know unless they searched Google on some other computer to try and figure it out and know exactly how to pipe the results and what those results will look like and how the next command needs to read the data.
And by no means is that command even complicated!
The other day I ran in to some obscure problem where my system acted like it was out of drive space, yet the drives did not report as full. Turns out after much research it was just that inode usage was filled up. What the heck is an inode? All the years I've been using Linux, the books I've read, the videos I've watched, nobody ever said "hey, you can actually have a full drive because inodes are used up, even when the drive reports as have 20% free space.".I had to delete old kernal images in /usr/src in order to free up inodes.
Nothing intuitive about
dfsaying I have 20% free space, butapt-getsaying it has no room to work because the drive is full. I have to discover this secret hidden inode thing that none of these tools makes mention of!No matter how much I try to study Linux, it takes me 10 minutes before I find myself searching Google tirelessly to figure out some mundane thing or where a config is stored, etc.
Anyway that's neither here nor there. I just think some people like the CLI environment, some people get it, some people "click" with it. But my brain just has a hard time. If my work is 80% Googling and 20% CLI work, but using a GUI makes it 80% work to 20% researching, I'd rather take the GUI. I just get more work done.
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@guyinpv said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
How is a blank screen with a blinking cursor "intuitive"? No person on earth could be put in front of that and somehow just know what to do. But at least with a GUI there is something to look at, pieces of text, descriptions, help bubbles, search bars, text labels.
Because we aren't people without training. We are in IT. We know the command line basics, it's been the same for decades. It's standard and well known. Sure, if you've never used a system before... but that's not our role.
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@guyinpv said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
Most of the commands I've ever needed to do something relatively trivial have been just disgusting to look at. I mean, try something like, find the largest 10 files on your computer. Is it "intuitive" to just know how to type something like
du -a / | sort -n -r | head -n 10or whatever. What's intuitive about that?that's totally intuitive to me, and has been since i was a teenager. Once you get past the initial "learning the command line" it's super straight forward. How do you do that on Windows without PowerShell or a third party tool?
For the command line, that's just "list my filesystems, sort numerically, great the top ten." It might look intimidating, but it is very intuitive.
On Windows, I literally dont know how to do it.
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@guyinpv said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
The other day I ran in to some obscure problem where my system acted like it was out of drive space, yet the drives did not report as full. Turns out after much research it was just that inode usage was filled up. What the heck is an inode? All the years I've been using Linux, the books I've read, the videos I've watched, nobody ever said "hey, you can actually have a full drive because inodes are used up, even when the drive reports as have 20% free space.".
That's a weird one. In all my years everyone talks about inodes yet no one ever runs out of them. So weird that you got that flipped around.
But windows has inodes too. You just never learn about them, and people don't tend to run Windows as hard so it doesn't come up as often. How do you list your inodes (ids) in Windows without PowerShell, though?
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@guyinpv said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
Nothing intuitive about
dfsaying I have 20% free space, butapt-getsaying it has no room to work because the drive is full. I have to discover this secret hidden inode thing that none of these tools makes mention of!df will tell you that. It's df -i
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@guyinpv said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
How is a blank screen with a blinking cursor "intuitive"?
It all comes back down to what you have spent the most time working with. I've spent a lot of time in Windows/Dos command prompts, and the Linux shells too...
The thing about any CLI system (be it a Linux shell or Powershell) is that you can almost always google what you want to do... Yes, that means you have to sort through a bunch of bad google results that may have nothing to do at all with what you are trying to do... but if you do it enough times... You'll know where to find the apache config files... or the DHCP server config files... etc.
Just like in Windows... If I had no idea how to set up a DHCP server or spin up a web server in Windows, what would I do? Google it...
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@guyinpv said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
Anyway that's neither here nor there. I just think some people like the CLI environment, some people get it, some people "click" with it. But my brain just has a hard time. If my work is 80% Googling and 20% CLI work, but using a GUI makes it 80% work to 20% researching, I'd rather take the GUI. I just get more work done.
I would agree with that. The problem is, once you get to any scale, the GUI is a huge problem. I've never seen anyone break the 60 servers per admin mark using GUIs. Even six figure people. They always get mired in the interfaces and the slowness of it all.
On the CLI, you can scale up like crazy. Even without special tools. Add in the special tools and you can be at thousands of machines per person.
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So let's just look at Windows GUI or Webmin or Zentyal... I've not tested this so I'm really asking. If you run out of inodes on any of those systems.... how does the GUI tell you that inodes are exhausted? Since this is a GUI vs CLI question. I have no idea how a GUI would not make things worse here, I've seen no GUI report on inodes, but the CLI does.
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@scottalanmiller said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
So let's just look at Windows GUI or Webmin or Zentyal... I've not tested this so I'm really asking. If you run out of inodes on any of those systems.... how does the GUI tell you that inodes are exhausted? Since this is a GUI vs CLI question. I have no idea how a GUI would not make things worse here, I've seen no GUI report on inodes, but the CLI does.
Can you do this via Powershell? I honestly have never run into an inode issue before. After a quick, preliminary search, I don't see any powershell commands, or "dos" commands, to list inode count or usage.
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@coliver said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
@scottalanmiller said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
So let's just look at Windows GUI or Webmin or Zentyal... I've not tested this so I'm really asking. If you run out of inodes on any of those systems.... how does the GUI tell you that inodes are exhausted? Since this is a GUI vs CLI question. I have no idea how a GUI would not make things worse here, I've seen no GUI report on inodes, but the CLI does.
Can you do this via Powershell? I honestly have never run into an inode issue before. After a quick, preliminary search, I don't see any powershell commands, or "dos" commands, to list inode count or usage.
I had looked up the PS command but don't have it on my screen now. There is one, though.
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@scottalanmiller said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
So let's just look at Windows GUI or Webmin or Zentyal... I've not tested this so I'm really asking. If you run out of inodes on any of those systems.... how does the GUI tell you that inodes are exhausted? Since this is a GUI vs CLI question. I have no idea how a GUI would not make things worse here, I've seen no GUI report on inodes, but the CLI does.
I've never had the error until now. I believe I was just running an
apt-get upgradeand it failed simply saying I was out of space. So a quick check withdfshowed I wasn't. Of course I learned about the inode switch later, but my only point is that there was nothing intuitive about the situation. I had to Google why it was saying out of space when I wasn't. It didn't take long to find the inode angle.I don't know how the GUI would handle it. Since most GUIs would have some interface for doing software updates, I would imagine I would also just get a visual error about being out of space.
The question, is the GUI/software smart enough to take it a step further and tell me why I'm out of space, or just leave it at the error?
My guess is the GUI would not be smart enough to take it further, and simply error about being out of space and leave it at that.It's no different in Windows when you try to install something and you just get some random obscure error and it closes.
I remember back in my computer repair days, software would sometimes throw DLL errors and we'd have to reregister the libraries using CLI commands.A GUI doesn't help with some stuff, but it does with others. Using GUIs for configuration, where you just have to look at checkboxes, drop down lists, toggle switches, text fields. So much easier than running around the file system editing touchy text files. Editing my network in Windows is worlds more intuitive than messing around with interfaces and network files.
Finding large files in Windows is just a matter of clicking the "size" filter in the search box and choosing "gigantic". It won't limit to 10 results though, it will just show everything. Or I use a nifty utility called WinDirStat.
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@guyinpv said in Compare ClearOS with Zentyal:
The question, is the GUI/software smart enough to take it a step further and tell me why I'm out of space, or just leave it at the error?
My guess is the GUI would not be smart enough to take it further, and simply error about being out of space and leave it at that.That's my thought and that would make it SO much worse when the GUI just lacks the info to explain what has happened.
