SAM wants EVERYONEb,"s input!

[Chris Vail]

Web Team:
1) Web based systems are a good idea. However, its no substitute for a command line. I much, much prefer, however, the X based systems.

2) The only time that I've seen a graphical interface that could do what a text interface could do was in IBM's SMIT utility. And even then, there was only a 90% overlap. Never, ever take away my command line!

3) I wouldn't want a monitoring tool that duplicated MeasureWare or Glance. If you're planning on including these in SAM, then I support it completely.

4)If anything were to be removed from SAM, I'd nominate disk and LVM stuff. I don't see how HP can anticipate everything I ever want to do with my disks, and write a GUI that will handle it. We use a lot of EMC product here, and I don't believe that you'll be able to support it very well at all.


Chris

[John Dvorchak]

If I use SAM it is only the TUI. In my environment the disk options are almost worthless. Here is what I have:
LVM with local disks and EMC disks via dual (primary and secondary) paths. When looking at disks in SAM it shows all of my "alternate" path disks as "Unused". I almost had a catastrophy as you can well imagine, thinking I had free disk space.

[Dave La Mar]

When I first took SA classes from HP, SAM was the method of preference for the instructors. While I understood this allowed for all class participants to get through the course in a timely manner, as others have stated, I really missed knowing what was going on in the background.
I believe someone suggested a button to capture the background commands.
In any event, the basic concepts were acquired using SAM and the user applied this to understanding what a command line option might be for each function.
So, in the class, teaching by SAM is fine, but in the real world an SA needs to know what is being performed.
One would be a bit lost faced with using a terminal at which SAM was not available.
Have I moaned enough in favor of having a display of the commands being executed in the background?

Thanks for asking.

Regards,

dl

[Balaji N]

Sam Team.

Thanks for asking this question.

1. No. There is no point in running a web server on all servers. If it is absolutely needed, let it be on a one system per subnet / network.

2. TUI is important. some time it is easy to perform certain mundane tasks using a GUI / TUI rather than running a set of commands. And i prefer TUI over GUI because i need X otherwise which eats to my performance / load.

3. i guess glance is there.

4. n/a

and as others have pointed out, for all actions, the exact command with options should be logged so it helps the user understand the tasks and use them in scripts or as needed.

cheers
-balaji

[Dave van Nierop]

Totally agree with JRF and others. No flaming - I love smit myself. The smit shortcut and command view are flexible and useful.

I don't load non-essential software or Apache - too many loose ends.

Some things don't work in sam, only in command mode - room for improvement. In system support we use a combination of TUI and GUI - sometimes it's easier to accomplish things in a TUI - also depends a lot on the mode of system access (not always a network connection). LAN console access is valuable as is the TUI (responsive).

- Dave

[harry d brown jr]

''1. Many tools in the industry are becoming web-based''

If "everyone" is smoking crack, does it make sense to join in? Seriously, the only "industry", as in hardware that is left is HP, IBM, and a little from SUN, and as for OS's there's a few unix, linux, bsd, and m$.

I think the SAM team needs to focus on making 'sam' faster and bug free. I can't imagine the SAM team staying on top of patching Apache when exploits are found.

If you made the display interface java capable, then you wouldn't need a web server!

''2. How important is a terminal user interface, or TUI, in your workday?''

If I don't have network capability for some reason or another, or if the server is in one of my DMZ's, then I need access to the SERIAL port ONLY!! We don't punch holes through firewalls and routers just to make someone's job a little easier.

''3. What types of system monitoring would be valuable to you? (e.g. HP-UX 11.22 allows some kernel parameters to be monitored)''

This is a job for Measureware, NOT "sam"! Of course I could change my attitude, if you were going to merge Measureware and sam together and give it away for free!

''4. Concerning disk and file system management (LVM included), we plan to address speed and LVM support.''

Well, if you are going to go for #3 you might as well just merge STM (xstm) and SAM together and do more visual representations of systems, disk drives, how they are being used under the vg & lv's, ...

live free or die
harry

[Tim Sanko]

1. Showing the command to be run and having an option that you could examine and modify it in a window would be spectacularly better than point and pray.

2. In the graphical world a
piture of devices and their level of utilization would be
a major improvement.

3. Intelligent monitoring of storage for sam (rate of increase across time). Just write a status file and compare. /d00x is X size and Y% full increasing at an average of Z/period.

[Mark Greene_1]

1. Absolutely not. This would almost be as bad a security hole as MS enabling IIS by default on Win2k.

2. n/a

3.Lots!

Network monitoring, specifically being able to tie a socket port number (like from netstat -t) to a PID. I can do this in linux (netstat -p). It helps to be able to find, for example, a runaway process that is creating one socket after another.

Better network error monitoring would be useful. I can do netstat -s at the command line, and save it to a file, do it again a minute or two later and then run diff against the two files and interpret the results to see how many tcp errors are being generated. This is very cumbersome, particulary while under the stress of trying to pinpoint which system is bogging down the lan. Being able to monitor errors on an incremental, on-demand basis would be a huge bonus, actually.

Being able to launch lanadmin, xstm, or jetadmin directly from a SAM window would help. Putting X windows tools (xclock, xcalc, xset) to work with third-party X client like Reflections or Exceed would help. Actually, building in agents to work more closely with third-party X clients would be a good thing in HP-UX, not just for SAM.

Also, it be nice to have a more direct method of tying a file system to a physical disk rather than doing vgdisplay -v at the command line and having to rely on knowing what file systems are on what lvols. We are getting ready to install our 5th HP server, and committing this sort of trivia to memeory is getting to be problematic.

There's more, but these are the most obvious ones I see.

HTH
mark

[Donny Jekels]

Follow who the windows junkies?

Think about how many Apache and if IIS(OMG) patches will have to follow to close all the holes.

As for disk mamangement - there has not been alot of work done on the Veritas VxVM side of the fence. I have done a study and determinded its cheaper to go wiht VxVM than with AdvJFS and PowerPath form EMC.

and I am not the smartest cookie on the block. many other cusotmers will figure it out too and go that route. besides you get a lot more features and bang for the buck on VxVM.

as for the UI, maybe think about a Windows client, that ties into SAM server?? that would make more sence.

[Zafar A. Mohammed_1]

Its not just System Administration Management,
Its

U N C L E

S A M




Thanks
Zafar