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