[ubuntu-uk] Home/Small Business Server

[Bruno Girin]

On 26/09/11 21:35, Matthew Daubney wrote:
> On 26 September 2011 21:17, Alan Pope<alan at popey.com>  wrote:
> <snip>
>
>> Ahh, SoHo server... a perennial "want" of many (including myself).
> I'm getting so annoyed by this being missing it's starting to become an itch :(
>
>> I'll refer you to this spec:-
>>
>> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuEasyBusinessServer
> Ah, lovely. I agreed with it largely until this....
> "The interface will be web based"
> And then I wanted to curl up in the foetal position and cry.
>
> BEWARE RANT AHOY!
>
> <rant>
> Why do people always want these things web based? I'd much rather
> prefer something that works simply in a nice easy gui that I could
> VNC/whatever into. In order to make things like this web based, you
> either have to lose some flexibility and/or can make it really hard to
> report back to the user what actually is going on. I've never really
> found a web based configuration gui I liked (and I write them for
> work).
Well the main benefit of a web based UI is that you don't need all the 
desktop GUI libraries on the server, which means that the server stays a 
server and can be a fairly lean machine that doesn't burn CPU to paint a 
desktop (important for a small office where running a powerful server 
24x7 can be prohibitively expensive and/or noisy). And considering the 
size and complexity of GUI code these days, adding a GUI to a server is 
likely to increase the potential for bug several folds.

I hear what you say about web front-ends but balancing the pros and 
cons, I would still go for a web front-end, mainly to keep the server 
lightweight. This doesn't preclude a standard GUI front-end on client 
machines though.

Bruno