[Info-vax] Vax Station 4000 VLC

[Scott Dorsey]

Dave Froble  <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>
>Ok, going aside for a moment, the biggest problem with WEENDOZE, from my 
>perspective, is it's continual changing.  I understand that Microsoft 
>wants to sell OS licenses, and continuing changes is a method to do 
>that.  But I'm rather upset when I must use WEENDOZE 7, and I wiped the 
>disk on which I had installed WEENDOZE 10 because I REALLY didn't like 
>it.  I'm Ok with WEENDOZE XP, but it's no longer supported, and doesn't 
>have drivers for newer HW.  For me, there is no good options with WEENDOZE.

People at big sites don't administer Windows machines.  They administer
active directory which pushes policies down to Windows machines.  This
allows most of the administrative work to be done without actually being
on the computer.

In the Linux world, similar functionality is provided by remote administration
tools like puppet and chef.

People at small sites administer Windows machines directly, using a gui,
and most of them administer Linux machines the same way, again using a gui.

But remote administration is standard in the industry and if you can't be
compatible with tools like chef and puppet you have a big problem getting
adoption.

>Back to VMS, I'd like some functionality to be presented in a GUI. 
>Looking at the disks, DIRECTORY, gives a better "picture" in a GUI. 
>Managing VMS using various GUI tools would be very nice to have.

Everybody today wants a file browser.  I hate file browsers, but they have
become a standard feature for users as well as for administrators.  I don't
think of the file browser as an administration tool... it's part of the user
UI.  And yes, in the 21st century it's something everyone expects.

>So, what to do?  Put effort into DECwindows?  Or another option? 
>Everything using a browser?  Don't really like that.  Use workstations, 
>WEENDOZE or other, with apps on the workstation to provide the GUI 
>environment?

You need to be able to do remote administration, either using a browser,
or AD tools, or backends for chef, puppet, and the like.  You also need
a GUI for users.  These are two pretty much unrelated things.

Remote access over the web for users is a very cool thing that people like
and which is -not- effectively provided by most popular operating systems.

>It's a tough question.  Having GUI based tools is desirable.  The 
>details of getting there is the problem.

Take the existing gui tools and run with them.  But consider them for
users more than for administration.  Adapt remote administration tools
to work with vms.  This gives you a basic toehold to begin from.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."