Re: [cobalt-users] the GUI interface

[Paul Ramsey <pramsey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm a new Cobalt user, but I have been running Linux boxes, and Red Hat
boxes in particular for quite some time. I am quite impressed with what
Cobalt has accomplished with their GUI tool, but I fear in the hostile
net environment just handing people a box with a GUI and saying 'go to
it' is a recipe for Bad News. At a minimum, new exploits will be found
and these boxen will get cracked regularly if they do not get good care
and feeding at the commandline.

I am still wrestling with what to do about the GUI: on the one hand, I
like the convenience, on the other hand, I dislike the extra complexity
in things like the httpd.conf files and so on. Not to mention being
unable to do hand tweaks without getting them overwritten. I am not sure
what will be my decision in the long term: to stick with it; or to just
disable the GUI, compile all my services again from scratch, and admin
the box like I usually would. The latter is more comfortable, because at
least then I know exactly what the configurations are.

Still thinking about it,
Paul

Dan Heller wrote:

> I will never use the gui to do anything on my system, so there's
> no chance that this will ever happen.  the simple fact that I couldn't
> do an important system-administration task on my machine because
> the GUI doesn't support it should be reason enough to wean onesself off
> of it asap.