On 4/7/2011 1:53 AM, brett lentz wrote:
2. An alternative to the CLI. Some people just like WebUIs and
prefer
to click a web page rather than use a CLI. That's fine; there's
nothing inherently wrong with that preference. So, the WebUI can allow
people to provision systems via WebUI.
This description seems rather dismissive of the WebUI and completely
dismisses some of the major use cases of the Cobbler UI including the
ability to scale and separation of duties. At my last company, we were
rolling out Cobbler to a user community of around 50 implementation and
operations engineers that were spread out across three continents
geographically, with varying levels of CLI capability and a lot of
configuration options. In addition, we had certain standard options
that could be chosen, but nothing was allowed outside of the standards.
To have given everyone CLI access to the cobbler servers would have
opened up the possibility of engineers making their own changes and
modifications outside of their scope of responsibility.
I was actually re-writing the WebUI to automatically deal with our
options (instead of having to worry about everyone properly adding them
to ksmeta line directly). I would have loved for the WebUI to be more
of a first class citizen and more easily extensible so that I didn't
have to start from scratch and could have just made local modifications
to the existing interface. It would have been very nice to have an easy
way to have a single WebUI point to multiple Cobbler replicas. In my
custom WebUI, I actually had the back-end determine which replica to
speak to based on the location the server was being deployed to.
-spp