Essential System Administration, 3rd Edition

About Menus and GUIs

For several years now, vendors and independent programmers have been developing elaborate system administration applications. The first of these were menu-driven, containing many levels of nested menus organized by subsystem or administrative task. Now, the trend is toward independent GUI-based tools, each designed to manage some particular system area and perform the associated tasks.

Whatever their design, all of them are designed to allow even relative novices to perform routine administrative tasks. The scope and aesthetic complexity of these tools vary considerably, ranging from shell scripts employing simple selections lists and prompts to form-based utiliti es running under X. A few even offer a mouse-based interface with which you perform operations by dragging icons around (e.g., dropping a user icon on top of a group icon adds that user to that group, dragging a disk icon into the trash unmounts a filesystem, and the like).

In this section, we’ll take a look at such tools, beginning with general concepts and then going on to a few practical notes about the tools available on the systems we are considering (usually things I wish I had known about earlier). The tools are very easy to use, so I won’t be including detailed instructions for using them (consult the appropriate documentation for that).

Ups and Downs

Graphical and menu-based system administration tools have some definite good points:

• They can provide a quick start to system administration, allowing ...