IBM AIX's SMIT or SuSE's YaST like tool for RHEL systems
Hello all,
Personally, I'm TOTALLY command-line type of person BUT I think that some interactive TUI (and maybe some GUI frontend for it) is needed on RHEL systems. I'm talking about tools like the one mentioned on the Title. Tools that take the most "popular" every day SysAdmin tasks and make them easier to install, configure and maintain.
Daniel Mor
RHCE/RHCT/RHCI/MCSA/MCDST/MCTS/MCP/A+ Certified
Responses
I agree, the smitty system in AIX is very nice to have. It also give you the command line equivalent.
Have you looked into webmin/usermin. Not Red Hat supported but still very handy to use.
I work in AIX machines too and smit (smitty) is nice addition to day-to-day admin used admin tools.
Would love to see something like that in RHEL 7..
I'm also familar with smitty on AIX and I dont like it.
I prefer the command line. When I started learning AIX I went in and found the proper commands so I wouldn't have to use smitty.
An example is having to reset the same local account on multiple systems. I would use cygwin and cluster-ssh to open up multiple sessions. Using smitty for this task would be a pain. just a simple command is all I need.
Community Member
98 points
We are a larger user of AIX and our admins transitioning into the Linux admin side would benefit greatly from something like SMIT as well.
I'd like it if it was accessible through a generic web-browser and supported some kind of API for central control, such as with an extended Satellite server.
One itch I have with redhat is the lack of a common tool to do "everything".
In suse I know that to do most sysadmin things I start yast and can then make my way to whatever I need to do.
For example, change the timezone (since our client has a habit of changing there mind about UTC/local).
In suse I start yast2, get a GUI or TUI, make my way system-date and time and then set the timezone. If I need to script it I can do 'yast timezone set timezone="Canada/Eastern" hwclock=utc' and it works just as well.
To do that in redhat I can use system-something but only if I have a GUI. no tui and not scriptable so if I don't have a gui I have to read the doc to find out that I need to change /etc/sysconfig/clock and /etc/localtime
Same things for many other things, with redhat it is system-something and you have to kind of guess which one plus many times it's only GUI.
Haven't used smitty to much but one thing I remember I liked was that I got the commandline version of what I was about to do so I can later add that to some script for automation.
Redhat already ships with way too many TUI's. Just do system-config-<tab><tab>.
It might be a good idea to bring these TUI's into 1 big one (Smitty, SAM). Please; no YAST. It would be pretty bad to install GTK / X libraries just for an configuration interface. NCurses maybe, but no YAST.
I don't really see the need for these tools. One one hand, it would be nice to get rid of all those system-config-thingie things, but on the other hand, I don't use them anyway. None of my collegues do either.
Yast doesn't need any X stuff and even if it's there it's runing ncurses. To do the X version (gtk/qt) you need to run yast2 and if you don't have DISPLAY defined it still falls back to ncurses
The major reason I don't use system-* is that most can't be scripted and/or require X to work. On SUSE platforms I do use yast (scripted and ncurses version) for things like looking software & repo management, setting up basic and advanced networking, timezone changes, ntp,proxy config and so on.
In redhat my only option is to edit relevant files directly (scripted or editor) and it's not always that easy to know the best way to know what to setup where (see timezone above or, how fast can you figure out what file to create to set an additional (ipv6) ip for a nic?)
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