[ubuntu-uk] Home/Small Business Server

[Bruno Girin]

On 26/09/11 22:34, Dave Morley wrote:
> On 26/09/11 22:18, Bruno Girin wrote:
>> 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
>>
>>
> Daft suggest possibly.
>
> How about a simple ncursor based cli interface.  Light enough for ssh 
> forwarding gui enough for a novice user to click on buttons.  I know 
> it's not as pretty as some *cough* light *cough* desktops but should 
> suffice.
>
>
>
That sounds like a good pragmatic solution, we can't have too many of 
those you know :-)

Bruno