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| From: Jerry Feldman <gaf at mediaone.NET> | On 28 Jun 98, at 16:26, Mike Bilow <mikebw at bilow.bilow.uu.ids.net> wrote: | > Interesting. I guess Red Hat has changed a few things since I last tried | > it. I am not sure how much I would trust GUI network configuration, | > especially since all it would do is write text configuration files. I | > remember the tool for this on SCO, and I used to give up fairly quickly | > and just edit the text files to get the job done faster. The problem is | > usually that the GUI tool has to be able to read the text configuration | > files to determine the currently configured state, and it only understands | > so much. | | The world is changing to GUI. Fortunately, everything in Unix can be done by | editing configuration files with emacs or vi. In a sense, this has always been true. I recall 'way back in the early days of Unix, one of the frequent explanations of its rapid spread (despite having no commercial support) was: All the other systems at the time had a lot of packages, each of which had its own complex config program, usually using the closest thing to a GUI at the time: full-screen ascii or ebcdic screens. The actual config files were universally binary "for efficiency", so you couldn't edit them. You just had to learn a new config tool for every new package. Then along came Unix, with the radical idea that all the config files would be plain text. To configure things, all you had to master was one editor. It made life much easier, and you could run these systems without having full-time staff experts in all the complex config tools. The popularity of GUIs today is just another form of the same thing. And it has exactly the same problem as this approach always has. But it looks flashier, and impresses people who don't have to use it much. In recent years, I've read a number of articles that suggest you watch the behavior of people whose job it is to keep networks running. They'll all show you these flashy, GUI-based tools that look pretty. But when something goes wrong, what they usually do is immediately open up a command window and start typing. They've learned from experience that all the fancy GUI network management packages are good at is impressing management. But if you want to actually find out what's wrong and fix it, you want a command interface. There does seem to be a move afoot to add lots of fancy GUI tools to linux. It's probably a good idea to have them if you are faced with impressing management. If you want signoffs on linux vs NT, you need pretty pictures. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of FAQs and HOWTOs that suggest using the GUI tools, too, and don't tell you what's going on behind the scene. My immediate problem can perhaps be summarized: Redhat 5.1 has this fancy Network Configurator that claims to be creating an eth1 interface. But eth1 never appears. Why not? The GUI tool thinks that all's fine and eth1 is active. Time to revert to the command line approach, I guess. I wonder if someone has documented just how a linux network interface comes into existence? I don't seem to find it in the HOWTOs, which tell me that the GUI tool will take care of it. There's probably some little config file somewhere that needs a trivial change. I wonder what it is? -- When puns are outlawed, only outlaws will be punished.
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