Just to add my two cents in here.
I often use FilerView as a toll for familiarizing cutomers with the filer. You can click on things and see what's going on. It steps up the learning curve. But there's nothing like a good Unix guy (girls included) working from the command line to make any system really do things. The difference is that when you use a GUI you sort of request things. When you use the command line you tell the system what to do. Why do you think they call it a "command" line?
As for the dial-in thing, That is the old way of doing things. Today you want to leverage your network to do things. I think that filers should have an option to hook a modem directly up to the console port, but the usefulness of such a feature is pretty limited. The product design is network centric. In the old days the network used to be unreliable. Today's switched netwoorks are probably the mostreliable part of the computing infrastructure. Except of course for your filers ;-)
Paulb Netapp Guy
-----Original Message----- From: owner-dl-toasters@netapp.com [mailto:owner-dl-toasters@netapp.com]On Behalf Of G D Geen Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2001 8:32 AM To: 'toasters@mathworks.com' Subject: Re: Filer Serial Connectivity
Ronan Mullally wrote:
On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, Joe Luchtenberg wrote:
Please forgive the ignorance of a sales guy lurking an engineers' discussion list...
Why would you want this type of solution instead of/in addition to FilerView? Granted, FilerView is network-bound (correct?), but if you need to dial in under a complete network outage wouldn't any RAS/terminal server solution do? (I'd be concerned about security issues with my filer console ports connected indirectly to a modem, though.) For those familiar with other remote management solutions, how does NetApp's remote manageability compare with, say, Compaq's Remote Insight Board Lights Out Edition? TIA. Joe
I think most of the reasons for this have already been covered. Mine are:
- GUIs suck (I'm a command line weenie).
Not to mention that for those of us who can type, old programmer etc., command line if much faster. With a couple of "for" loops, sed, and awk, I can make the same changes to all 35 of my filers within seconds and modify the necessary files at the same time. This is a time saver. Even if I have to telnet into each filer, such as changing the root password, I just use a for loop to telnet into each filer.
One reason that I do like the GUIs is because I have a lot of new guys coming into the group and I can, as I have done in the past, modified the web interface to disallow the new guys from making system modifications through the web interface.
You can invariably do a lot more from the console that you can via a GUI.
A console server gets you out of band access to your devices. Throw in a (properly secured) modem and you don't even need a functioning network, or a functioning IP stack on either end to be able to access your boxes.
If your hardware has the necessary functionality you can do anything that doesn't require physical access remotely (including powering up and down devices).
The conserver package we use allows every single command and every character of output to be logged to disk, so when things go wrong you can trace back *exactly* what has happened.
-Ronan