… is a good clone of SMIT.
SMIT for those who have not been exposed to AIX, is a system administration tool that allows you to perform tasks through a graphical (or text-based) interface. Just like any other tool really, but the killer feature is that once you have built up a task in SMIT such as extend a logical volume by a certain amount, you can then ask it what the command-line equivalent is.
Now all you point and drool fans out there are probably thinking “So what?”. Well perhaps this feature is not for you, but it does allow those who work at the command line to find out what command is necessary to perform a certain task. Once you know the command to perform a task you can :-
- Use it to setup a cron job to run the task at a particular time. No need to stay up late to perform a task in a “maintenance window” after midnight.
- Run that command on a whole rack full of servers using a tool like pssh. Much easier than repeating the same steps on a dozen computers one by one – aren’t these computers supposed to automate tedious jobs for us ?
- Use that command to put into a script to run on certain events. For instance you could monitor the available space on all your filesystems and grow the filesystem when the available space drops below a certain trigger point. You might also want to automatically order a new hard disk when the “volume group” runs out of space 🙂
Linux is currently undergoing a process of fragmentation where different distributions are operated in different ways much like the old commercial Unix variants went through in the 1990s. A good clone of SMIT would go a long way to allowing different distributions to go their own way in system administration commands, but allow system administrators to use a standard tool to manage any Linux distribution.