[advocacy-discuss] The phpEasyTools for OpenSolaris are ready !

[Richard L. Hamilton]

> 
> EasyTools has been written in PHP, so it is almost
> trivial to install and
> configure. It aims to help newcomers to take their
> first steps with
> OpenSolaris, by helping them to easily perform
> administration operations at
> the same time that it shows the real command that is
> being executed
> underneath.
[...]

You mention one of two particular features also present in a useful
administration utility associated with an otherwise rather divergent
member of the Unix family (AIX's "smit"), namely a navigable interface
that also can show the command line equivalents.  The other feature
I find interesting with "smit" is that it can be persuaded to keep a
log of exactly who did what, so that mistakes can be more quickly
corrected since they can be understood (and perhaps so a little
remedial training can be applied).

Given that MCSEs are a dime a dozen, but persons with more clue
are correspondingly more scarce, the combination of those features
might be particularly helpful.

However, the original had a choice of a character (curses or something
comparable, I suppose) or GUI interface.  Those could probably
operate in a reasonably lightweight, damaged, or limited environment;
I'm not so sure a browser-based interface could.

If there's some reasonably minimal toolkit, preferably using something
already present in /usr to do most of its work (maybe perl with the
addition of suitable curses or Tk modules from cpan), I think a
character-or-local-GUI interface would remain desirable.  Given that
perl can also be used to create web interfaces, _if_ something exists
or could readily be created that could readily work with any of those
three interfaces (character, GUI, or web), be reasonably comprehensive
(say task-oriented menus plus prompts and online help that covered
about 90-95% of administrative tasks), and had the features of
showing underlying commands (more important as Solaris adds
administrative commands in place of files to edit and processes to
signal) and logging user actions, I think that would go a long way
to making reasonably intelligent but untrained people able to be
more useful; even more so if it integrated with RBAC so that
one could start the new folks out without access to the most
potentially destructive functionality.
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