[ubuntu-uk] Home/Small Business Server

[Matthew Daubney]

Sorry, this is turning into a big rant about web based admin and
having a gui on a small office/home server, but this is something that
really really pushes the "GAH" buttons for me.

<begin more ranting>

On 26 September 2011 22:18, Bruno Girin <brunogirin at gmail.com> wrote:
<snip me ranting lots>
>
> Well the main benefit of a web based UI is that you don't need all the
> desktop GUI libraries on the server,

Yes, because HDD space is expensive these days! Lets have a look shall
we, on the front page of ebuyer this,
http://www.ebuyer.com/251310-extra-value-desktop-7873-1036 a cheap
desktop with 1TB of disk space for less than £200.
http://www.ebuyer.com/264274-wd-2tb-3-5-sata-iii-6gb-s-caviar-green-hard-drive-64mb-cache-wd20earx
a 2TB HDD for less than £70. This really isn't an argument anymore.

> 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).

Ok, so to run XFCE the minimum spec is a 300MHz CPU and 192MB of RAM
(http://wiki.xfce.org/minimum_requirements), again I can see that this
adds a massive overhead on the currently underspecced bottom range
computers since my eeePC could do that standing on it's head and still
be coping ok. Since you could do that on this £60 quid motherboard
(http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=60 first one at the top entitled
"Intel D425KT Fanless Atom Mini-ITX Board") and still have processing
power left over, which is passivley cooled so has no need for "noisy"
fans, I fail to see this as an argument in the environments this is
aimed at. Most of the small offices I go to use Mac Minis for this
kind of thing, you seem to be assuming you'd need a 1U rackmount
server!

> 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.

because that's less complicated to debug than a full stack of
Webserver/Interpreter (PHP/Python)/Database
(mysql/postgres/couch/whatever)/backend services to prevent webserver
requiring root privs/ and then the stack of other services you
actually want. Of course, if something breaks in a GUI environment,
I'd suspect the average person on the end of the phone wouldn't be too
scared of being talked through fixing it rather than average bloke on
the end of th phone where you say "First go to the server and go to
the console and do this" <- Easiest way to destroy sales ever.

> 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.

On todays hardware.... I really wouldn't.

-Matt Daubney