I've set up a temporary Beaker instance to demonstrate my proposed system page improvements [1] which will hopefully be landing in the 0.17 release.
The demo instance is here:
You can log in as "demo" with password "demo". There are no real systems or lab controllers attached, and no distros imported, so it's not a fully functional Beaker instance. But I created some dummy systems with a variety of permissions granted, so it's enough to try out most of the system page features.
If you're interested in the evolution of the system page, please take a look and reply with your feedback.
[1] http://beaker-project.org/dev/proposals/system-page-improvements.html
On 02/26/2014 04:14 PM, Dan Callaghan wrote:
I've set up a temporary Beaker instance to demonstrate my proposed system page improvements [1] which will hopefully be landing in the 0.17 release.
The demo instance is here:
You can log in as "demo" with password "demo". There are no real systems or lab controllers attached, and no distros imported, so it's not a fully functional Beaker instance. But I created some dummy systems with a variety of permissions granted, so it's enough to try out most of the system page features.
If you're interested in the evolution of the system page, please take a look and reply with your feedback.
Very nice!
One thing I noticed while clicking around is that either the central or right hand quick info box should likely indicate whether an Operational system is in Automated or Manual mode, rather than having that implied by the Take vs Reserve button. Comparing these two pages illustrates the problem (the buttons are different, with no indication of the reason):
http://209.132.179.159/bkr/view/demo-available-for-manual-reserve.example.in... http://209.132.179.159/bkr/view/demo-available-for-reserve.example.invalid#e...
This could be as simple as changing the "Idle" label to "Idle (Manual)" and "Idle (Automated)" as appropriate.
The other thing I noticed in clicking through the workflow on the system with loans enabled is that *returning* the system wasn't very smooth:
1. Click Borrow in right hand quick info 2. Click Take 3. Click Return 4. Click Take accidentally(!) 5. Click Return again 6. Find & Click "Loan" in the tab navigation 7. Click Return Loan
So, I'm thinking it may be appropriate to have a split button there in a couple of cases:
* Loaned to you: split between Take/Return Loan * Loaned to someone else (and you can return the loan): split Borrow/Return Loan
Another smaller thing I noticed is that the left hand tab menu can get *very* wide - it should probably have a max width set in its CSS so it doesn't waste too much space in a wider viewport.
Cheers, Nick.
On 02/26/2014 01:46 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
On 02/26/2014 04:14 PM, Dan Callaghan wrote:
I've set up a temporary Beaker instance to demonstrate my proposed system page improvements [1] which will hopefully be landing in the 0.17 release.
The demo instance is here:
You can log in as "demo" with password "demo". There are no real systems or lab controllers attached, and no distros imported, so it's not a fully functional Beaker instance. But I created some dummy systems with a variety of permissions granted, so it's enough to try out most of the system page features.
If you're interested in the evolution of the system page, please take a look and reply with your feedback.
Very nice!
One thing I noticed while clicking around is that either the central or right hand quick info box should likely indicate whether an Operational system is in Automated or Manual mode, rather than having that implied by the Take vs Reserve button. Comparing these two pages illustrates the problem (the buttons are different, with no indication of the reason):
http://209.132.179.159/bkr/view/demo-available-for-manual-reserve.example.in... http://209.132.179.159/bkr/view/demo-available-for-reserve.example.invalid#e...
This could be as simple as changing the "Idle" label to "Idle (Manual)" and "Idle (Automated)" as appropriate.
The other thing I noticed in clicking through the workflow on the system with loans enabled is that *returning* the system wasn't very smooth:
- Click Borrow in right hand quick info
- Click Take
- Click Return
- Click Take accidentally(!)
- Click Return again
- Find & Click "Loan" in the tab navigation
- Click Return Loan
So, I'm thinking it may be appropriate to have a split button there in a couple of cases:
I noticed this too... no simple and obvious way to return the loan... which leads us to a lack of systems because people forget to return them, especially when the "take" button changes to "return" it leads me to believe that if I'm done with the box, I can just click "Return" and move on without realizing I didn't actually return the loan. So no better/worse than the old design in this respect, since in the old one it wasn't obvious I had to return the loan either unless I happened to click on my userid.
- Loaned to you: split between Take/Return Loan
- Loaned to someone else (and you can return the loan): split
Borrow/Return Loan
Another smaller thing I noticed is that the left hand tab menu can get *very* wide - it should probably have a max width set in its CSS so it doesn't waste too much space in a wider viewport.
Cheers, Nick.
One other thing, (nothing to do with the new design, really) in the past few weeks we have been training some new people on Beaker, and each and every one (myself included) will click on the "power config" aka "power" link to turn on/off/reboot the machine. This of course does not work, you have to click the "command" link.. leading me to believe I'm gonna get some sort of ssh/console in a browser window (yuck!) rather than buttons letting me turn the box on and off. Can we rename options/change the layout in some way we can make this less confusing?
Excerpts from Mike Gahagan's message of 2014-02-27 07:32:43 +1000:
One other thing, (nothing to do with the new design, really) in the past few weeks we have been training some new people on Beaker, and each and every one (myself included) will click on the "power config" aka "power" link to turn on/off/reboot the machine. This of course does not work, you have to click the "command" link.. leading me to believe I'm gonna get some sort of ssh/console in a browser window (yuck!) rather than buttons letting me turn the box on and off. Can we rename options/change the layout in some way we can make this less confusing?
Yes, now is the time to do it since the tabs are being shifted around already for the updated system page.
Can you suggest an arragement of the tabs that might be less confusing?
We have struggled with this before, the reason we settled on "Commands" was because the commands are more than just power -- it's also where you can clear the netboot configuration. And "interrupt" is not really power-related either, even though it goes over IPMI.
On 02/27/2014 07:49 AM, Dan Callaghan wrote:
Excerpts from Mike Gahagan's message of 2014-02-27 07:32:43 +1000:
One other thing, (nothing to do with the new design, really) in the past few weeks we have been training some new people on Beaker, and each and every one (myself included) will click on the "power config" aka "power" link to turn on/off/reboot the machine. This of course does not work, you have to click the "command" link.. leading me to believe I'm gonna get some sort of ssh/console in a browser window (yuck!) rather than buttons letting me turn the box on and off. Can we rename options/change the layout in some way we can make this less confusing?
Yes, now is the time to do it since the tabs are being shifted around already for the updated system page.
Just noticed a bug: if you associate a system with a lab controller, you need to refresh the page to update the power settings tab. I expect that's just the known problem with it not being a Backbone widget, though.
Can you suggest an arragement of the tabs that might be less confusing?
We have struggled with this before, the reason we settled on "Commands" was because the commands are more than just power -- it's also where you can clear the netboot configuration. And "interrupt" is not really power-related either, even though it goes over IPMI.
Ah, I just realised that one benefit of the new vertical layout for the tab list is we can make the titles a bit longer, and splitting a tab is less of a problem. So, here's my suggestion.
1. Move the full command queue out to its own "Command Queue" tab under history 2. Rename the existing Power tab as "Power Settings" 3. Rename the Commands tab as Power
Now, to justify the presence of "Clear Netboot" on the Power tab, I suggest we do the following: report some basic "last known state" information on the Power tab, specifically enough so users know what's likely to happen if they reboot or power on the system.
As an initial version of this, two relatively simple to calculate values that seem useful:
Last netboot configuration: Provision <distro> or Cleared (Boot Menu) Last power status: On or Off
So then the purpose of Clear Netboot is to get the boot menu when you power on the system.
You could also do this without moving the command queue history to its own tab, but I think that would get a little busy.
Cheers, Nick.
On 02/26/2014 11:50 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
On 02/27/2014 07:49 AM, Dan Callaghan wrote:
Excerpts from Mike Gahagan's message of 2014-02-27 07:32:43 +1000:
One other thing, (nothing to do with the new design, really) in the past few weeks we have been training some new people on Beaker, and each and every one (myself included) will click on the "power config" aka "power" link to turn on/off/reboot the machine. This of course does not work, you have to click the "command" link.. leading me to believe I'm gonna get some sort of ssh/console in a browser window (yuck!) rather than buttons letting me turn the box on and off. Can we rename options/change the layout in some way we can make this less confusing?
Yes, now is the time to do it since the tabs are being shifted around already for the updated system page.
Just noticed a bug: if you associate a system with a lab controller, you need to refresh the page to update the power settings tab. I expect that's just the known problem with it not being a Backbone widget, though.
Can you suggest an arragement of the tabs that might be less confusing?
We have struggled with this before, the reason we settled on "Commands" was because the commands are more than just power -- it's also where you can clear the netboot configuration. And "interrupt" is not really power-related either, even though it goes over IPMI.
Ah, I just realised that one benefit of the new vertical layout for the tab list is we can make the titles a bit longer, and splitting a tab is less of a problem. So, here's my suggestion.
- Move the full command queue out to its own "Command Queue" tab under
history 2. Rename the existing Power tab as "Power Settings" 3. Rename the Commands tab as Power
Now, to justify the presence of "Clear Netboot" on the Power tab, I suggest we do the following: report some basic "last known state" information on the Power tab, specifically enough so users know what's likely to happen if they reboot or power on the system.
I can't see the system page on your demo site currently (getting 500 errors) so going off of memory from a couple of days ago...
I like this direction a little bit better... maybe "Power Settings" should be renamed to "System Configuration" ... Maybe grey it out or something similar if the user does not have enough access to do those tasks.. I nearly always use the Beaker webUI as a "normal user" and have only recently done any administration of the lab systems themselves through the Beaker UI.
I was trying to think of something better than "Power" but all I could come up with is "control system" or something similar which might be just as confusing. Also there a somewhat DOS'able bug with respect to lab systems here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=916302
As an initial version of this, two relatively simple to calculate values that seem useful:
Last netboot configuration: Provision <distro> or Cleared (Boot Menu) Last power status: On or OffSo then the purpose of Clear Netboot is to get the boot menu when you power on the system.
You could also do this without moving the command queue history to its own tab, but I think that would get a little busy.
Cheers, Nick.
Excerpts from Mike Gahagan's message of 2014-03-01 07:49:06 +1000:
I can't see the system page on your demo site currently (getting 500 errors) so going off of memory from a couple of days ago...
Sorry about that. The demo is hosted on Red Hat's "OS1" OpenStack instance, which is not really production quality yet. It looks like the VM got some I/O errors on its virtual disk. I tried rebooting it but now it has gone AWOL. I will try and either rescue it or just reprovision it from scratch.
Excerpts from Nick Coghlan's message of 2014-02-27 14:50:44 +1000:
Just noticed a bug: if you associate a system with a lab controller, you need to refresh the page to update the power settings tab. I expect that's just the known problem with it not being a Backbone widget, though.
Right. I just put up a patch to port the power settings widget to Backbone: http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/2865
Ah, I just realised that one benefit of the new vertical layout for the tab list is we can make the titles a bit longer, and splitting a tab is less of a problem. So, here's my suggestion.
- Move the full command queue out to its own "Command Queue" tab under
history
The advantage of showing the queue on the same page as the buttons is that pressing a button triggers a new command to show up in the queue as "Queued". It's a nice instant feedback to indicate that the button press really did something, and it means we don't have to resort to notification saying "yes we really enqueued your command".
Also I imagined one day in the future we could do EventStream (or even just regular polling) to refresh the command queue state, so that you can hit the Reboot button, a queued command appears, and then a few seconds later your command changes to Completed.
So I think we are better off keeping the command buttons and the queue together.
- Rename the existing Power tab as "Power Settings"
It's called "Power Settings" in 0.15, I had renamed it to just "Power" for the new system page because I introduced the tab groupings. That one is grouped under "Configuration" so the word "Settings" seemed redundant. But looking at it again, I think "Power Settings" is reasonable, and should reduce confusion. Same thing applies to "Scheduler [Settings]".
- Rename the Commands tab as Power
Now, to justify the presence of "Clear Netboot" on the Power tab, I suggest we do the following: report some basic "last known state" information on the Power tab, specifically enough so users know what's likely to happen if they reboot or power on the system.
As an initial version of this, two relatively simple to calculate values that seem useful:
Last netboot configuration: Provision <distro> or Cleared (Boot Menu) Last power status: On or OffSo then the purpose of Clear Netboot is to get the boot menu when you power on the system.
We can definitely show the current netboot status, and I guess it does justify having the Clear Netboot button there even when the tab is named "Power".
I would hesitate to show the power status because it might give unrealistic expectations -- the power can easily be controlled outside of Beaker (simplest example: run shutdown) so there's a very high chance if we claim the system is on or off, that it really won't be.
Excerpts from Mike Gahagan's message of 2014-02-27 07:32:43 +1000:
On 02/26/2014 01:46 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
The other thing I noticed in clicking through the workflow on the system with loans enabled is that *returning* the system wasn't very smooth:
- Click Borrow in right hand quick info
- Click Take
- Click Return
- Click Take accidentally(!)
- Click Return again
- Find & Click "Loan" in the tab navigation
- Click Return Loan
So, I'm thinking it may be appropriate to have a split button there in a couple of cases:
I noticed this too... no simple and obvious way to return the loan... which leads us to a lack of systems because people forget to return them, especially when the "take" button changes to "return" it leads me to believe that if I'm done with the box, I can just click "Return" and move on without realizing I didn't actually return the loan. So no better/worse than the old design in this respect, since in the old one it wasn't obvious I had to return the loan either unless I happened to click on my userid.
Yes I agree, we need an equally obvious way to return the loan.
Unfortunately Bootstrap 2 doesn't have block-level button groups, which is what we would need here to make it look right. They were added in Bootstrap 3, I will look into backporting those bits.
Excerpts from Dan Callaghan's message of 2014-02-27 07:52:42 +1000:
Excerpts from Mike Gahagan's message of 2014-02-27 07:32:43 +1000:
On 02/26/2014 01:46 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
The other thing I noticed in clicking through the workflow on the system with loans enabled is that *returning* the system wasn't very smooth:
- Click Borrow in right hand quick info
- Click Take
- Click Return
- Click Take accidentally(!)
- Click Return again
- Find & Click "Loan" in the tab navigation
- Click Return Loan
So, I'm thinking it may be appropriate to have a split button there in a couple of cases:
I noticed this too... no simple and obvious way to return the loan... which leads us to a lack of systems because people forget to return them, especially when the "take" button changes to "return" it leads me to believe that if I'm done with the box, I can just click "Return" and move on without realizing I didn't actually return the loan. So no better/worse than the old design in this respect, since in the old one it wasn't obvious I had to return the loan either unless I happened to click on my userid.
Yes I agree, we need an equally obvious way to return the loan.
Unfortunately Bootstrap 2 doesn't have block-level button groups, which is what we would need here to make it look right. They were added in Bootstrap 3, I will look into backporting those bits.
I wrote a patch to show both Take and Return Loan when they are both permitted.
Now that we are allowing Take of Automated systems that are loaned, that means it's (almost) always going to show both Take and Return Loan, when a system is loaned.
http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/2869
This does kind of defeat the stated design of the quick info boxes which was for each one to have "a single button offering the most common action", but oh well...
On 03/04/2014 04:21 PM, Dan Callaghan wrote:
Now that we are allowing Take of Automated systems that are loaned, that means it's (almost) always going to show both Take and Return Loan, when a system is loaned.
http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/2869
This does kind of defeat the stated design of the quick info boxes which was for each one to have "a single button offering the most common action", but oh well...
I think when you wrote that we were still disallowing taking automated systems entirely. We also didn't account for the choice between "Borrow" vs "Return" for someone that has loan admin rights on a system that is currently loaned to someone else.
I think offering one or two most common actions is still a big improvement over the status quo.
Cheers, Nick
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