[ubuntu-uk] Home/Small Business Server

[Liam Proven]

On 26 September 2011 22:29, James Thomas <selinium at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 26, 2011 10:18 PM, "Bruno Girin" <brunogirin at gmail.com> 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
>
> Could you not administer a server with a client on a desktop elsewhere?
> That way you could keep the server lean and you could design it as such that
> it could be installed on any OS desktop opening a more comfortable route for
> windows / apple users?

Well, yes, but it means a fair bit more work, developing such a thing,
and ideally it would have to support Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, at
the least.

Whereas it's extremely likely that all modern client workstations will
have a decent web browser and between technologies like HTML5 and AJAX
said web-admin client could be very rich and usable.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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