| Tuesday, May 21, 2002 |
15:14 - Do Servers Need GUIs?
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2866486,00.html
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Hell yes, they do.
This ZDNet article represents the third AnchorDesk pundit who's weighing in on the Xserve, and his opinions seem to be drowned out by those of the people he's interviewed.
"Sys admins are not impressed by screen candy. And let's face it, there's no such thing as a 'server for the masses.' The masses don't need or use servers; systems administrators are the folks who baby-sit servers. Less is more in server land, and cute GUIs are not a plus. At best, they consume machine resources that could be going towards useful work. At worst, they get in the way," expounded Lynwood Hines. "Face it, there are very few Mac-centric networks out there. The market for this thing is tiny. I wish them all the luck in the world, but there's nothing earth-shattering or society-changing about this server."
See, there's a trap waiting for those who are too eager to dismiss Aqua as "cute": they fail to notice that these administration interfaces are designed with sysadmins in mind. More than that, they're designed by sysadmins and geeks-- people who have been able to let go of the ego-driven spotlight of Computer Literacy (about which I wrote several days ago) and realize that a well-designed GUI is a Godsend-- even to geeks.
Anybody who dismisses the Xserve as "just another 1U box" hasn't watched the keynote presentation of its introduction. There's so much in there that just doesn't come out in the bare spec sheets. It's ninety minutes long, but if you've got that much time to spare, do yourself a favor and watch it (click on the picture); you'll see what I'm talking about.
(Life is about the fleeting little moments. That's why I wrote about yesterday's sunshowers this morning. It's impossible, even with a camera, to capture all the little flashes of color, all the subtle shifts and glints of air and water and tree and metal and distant mountain that made yesterday's drive home something I wished could have lasted for hours. I could have written about it until the post's length overran the size of a MEDIUMTEXT field, and you still wouldn't have experienced what I experienced. Likewise, you can stare at a spec sheet all day and mull over numbers, but unless you watch the presentation, you won't know sublime joys like the mass giggle Phil Schiller got when he described his TiBook as "the administrator's tool of choice", or seeing him add an Xserve that was "over in the Piano Bar" to the monitor list, or hearing the shh-TUNK as Steve slid the stage demo Xserve back into its slot in the rack. It's these little joys, these little moments that make Mac users believe in the greater vision-- because it all seems so real, such a shared experience. We're all up there on stage with him.)
The Server Monitor application is a perfect illustration of "whole-widget" engineering; it will tell you when a fan goes out, cross-monitor with the temperature of the CPU that fan protects, and let you speed up the other fan to compensate until you can swap in a new one (which, by the way, can be done without a screwdriver or even powering-down the server). It will send e-mails or pages to hierarchies of recipients (starting with the lowest-level, first-tier, then graduating to the next-tier guy if the first-tier guy hasn't woken up yet) whenever some alert happens, according to your configuration. Sure, an astute UNIX geek can rig up the same thing using healthd, cron, weird sendmail aliases, and some home-grown Perl scripts-- and that geek will feel awfully proud of himself for having done so. (Trust me, I've been in exactly that position before, many times.) But even the hardest-core of IT geeks will see the benefit-- or at least, they will if they're worth their salary-- in having that functionality built-in, easy to use, attractive (and therefore likely to encourage you to use it-- don't discount the psychological aspect of software that creates a pleasant environment), and complete-- thus saving him all the time and effort of putting that rig together.
When the vendor is solving your problems for you, only an idiot will argue.
In the same vein, Server Admin is the kind of thing that Apache administrators secretly long for. Sure, we can feel all smug about knowing how to tweak the httpd.conf file and then type "apachectl restart". But listen: Remember when you had to manually grep the process table for the master httpd process and kill -HUP it in order to restart Apache? Remember when apachectl was first introduced-- it was a vast improvement, a single centralized command that gave you complete control over the server processes without having to delve into the ps table? Remember how a little voice in the back of your head told you, Hey-- hey! That's the sissy way out! Stick to grepping for PIDs, dagnabbit! Remember telling that voice to shut up, because apachectl was just so damned slick and useful?
I've got a secret for you: Apple's Server Admin app is exactly the same kind of thing as apachectl. It's an attractive, easy-to-use shortcut. It's a centralized piece of functionality that saves you time. Because it's so dang easy, your whole IT body will rebel against you as you reach for that mouse-- but if you're worth your salt, you will immediately realize the freedom that having a one-button server start/stop button gives you.
And yes, you can open up the details of the configuration and change it all on the fly. And it's much better organized than in httpd.conf, for which it's all a front-end. Apache configuration front-ends have been written before, and they've always been eschewed by the purists-- until they try them, and grudgingly realize that to use a GUI is not such a hateful form of selling-out as they might at first think-- because even geeks strive for ease-of-use. That's what apachectl is. A geek trying to make his life easier.
Watch the keynote, and you'll see what I mean.
Mind you, I'm no CLI-hater. I wrote half of a thousand-page book about how to administer a UNIX server through command-line tools, and I spent a lot of those pages describing cool hints and tips and ways the savvy IT guy can make himself even more the master of his esoteric domain. I can tell you how to make Sendmail sing, how to dish out DNS, how to brew up a firewall that will zip up your network to be totally airtight without ever having to grovel with your hat in your hand before the doors of a commercial software vendor.
But I know a superior solution to an age-old problem when I see one. And if Apple's tools can make my ability to write a Sendmail filter irrelevant, then by gum I've got some brain cells to retask to something more important.
Now, one might say that Windows' server GUI has already solved these same problems. Well, sure, I reply. But you know... one thing Windows never solved is complete headless operation. To use the GUI, you had to stand at the local machine, with a monitor and keyboard and mouse hooked up to the rack panel, and a KVM switching between the machines. There are some funky centralized tools for Windows network administrators, but every single one of them looks exactly the same-- "Component Services", "Computer Management", "Distributed File System", "Event Viewer", "Internet Services Manager". Every one of these tools has the same layout-- a hierarchy of objects down the left column, details on the right, and the option you want is always grayed-out. As is so often the case with Windows, the functionality is there, in a basic form-- but it's impossible to figure out. Windows administrators often lament that they wish they had a command-line interface to use, because the GUI is just so unconscionably bad. And in any case, most of these tools can only be used from the local console.
The Xserve is a "best of both worlds" platform. You've got command-line UNIX administration if you want it, but IT engineers who understand the value of their time will quickly discover how valuable it is to pop open a single remote-administration application, press a couple of obvious buttons with instant visual feedback, and be done with their task. And for people who appreciate a GUI already, but who wish it could just be understandable, and would just work without cursing and spitting and chicken-blood sacrifices, and would let you do it all remotely without having to go into the server room and figure out how to work the damned KVM-- a few minutes playing with an Xserve from an iMac in the next room will make a believer out of any of them.
Oh, and it all comes for free with the server. I keep not forgetting to mention that.
(By the way, the presentation talks about RAID, including striping and mirroring; so if you watch it, you'll see plenty of discussion of that and other topics that look like liabilities on paper, only because the spec sheets don't adequately explain what's going on.)
It remains to be seen whether the Xserve will sell well. But some IT people will buy them, and word will spread. Word tends to spread in IT circles.
And if Apple has indeed "done it right", as all visual evidence suggests they have, then the people who continue to cling to the merits of GUI-less server platforms for lack of a good counterexample will have one fed to them with great gusto by their peers.
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