18 Aug
2004
18 Aug
'04
8:09 p.m.
Speaking purely for myself, as a long-time Sysadmin, the fact that so much of Netapp's config is stored in text files was a *big* advantage to me. Databases always seem like a good idea until they get corrupted, or the front-end administration tools fail because of bad data. (Anyone else ever adminned AIX? Hell, just the other day I had to spend a fair amount of time trying to repair a corrupted registry on a Windows box.)
--
Mike Sphar - Sr Systems Administrator - Remedy, a BMC Software Company
-----Original Message-----
From: Haynes, Tom [mailto:thomas@netapp.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 18, 2004 1:04 PM
To: skeezics@selectmetrics.com
Cc: toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: Re: Automatic NFS export on vol create
Is it a dumbing down or an automation of common steps? I know when
I designed and coded the automatic writing of the /etc/exports, my
goal was to remove some repetitive and manual steps.
You have to remember that is what programming is all about:
1) finding common blocks of functionality and wrapping them in a function.
2) reducing the human interaction.
Some of the posters on this thread make it sound like this was a
conspiracy.
If we had been a brand new company and we came out with a product
which kept the exports information in a database instead of a flat
file, would you have been this upset? Or would you have enjoyed
the experience?
I've been of the flat file bent myself for a long time. Now that
I have to maintain the exports file, I'm leaning towards a database
for it. There is just too much ambiguity in parsing entries in
the host lists - well formed fields, like *shudder* XML, make too
much sense.
Anyway, there is no global plan to dumb down the product - just
local designs to reduce problems found in customer escalations.
> On Wed, 18 Aug 2004, Bruce Arden wrote:
>
> Uh, whoops, now I've got this "/vol/new" export at the end of the file?
> Hmmm. Harmless, in this case, because at reboot there was no volume named
> "new" so it wasn't exported... still, this was another little surprise
> that could have had more serious consequences, and as another long-time
> Unix/ONTAP hacker I have to lobby against the dumbing down of ONTAP. Any
> sysadmin qualified to run the box can learn it in an hour or less; filers
> don't need to be much simpler than they are now. What's next? "Hey,
> Boeing, this 747 is too hard to fly, make it easier so we can use cheaper
> pilots."
>
> Cringe.
>
> -- Chris
>
--
Tom Haynes, ex-cfb
thomas@netapp.com