On 4/7/2011 1:53 AM, brett lentz wrote:
- 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