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A smoke-jumping admin's best friend
TUI Tools
The Supercomputing Conference always causes me to reflect on the tools I use for system administration and the tools I would love to have. The most difficult situations I encounter as an admin occur when I can't get the display server to work on a remote system, with no easy way to plug in to a crash cart. Usually, I can SSH to the system and poke around to see what is happening: I'm definitely going to want to test the node to see whether my corrections work. This combination of searching, debugging, and testing over a simple login with SSH is not always easy. Sometimes I miss graphical tools, particularly, if I'm looking at the node's time histories. (My favorite is users swapping the node to death or invoking the dreaded out-of-memory – OOM – error, which is sometimes difficult to find.)
For situations like these, I reach for text-based user interface (TUI) tools. They give me some reasonable graphics while not requiring a display server on the system. TUIs are extremely useful but underrated admin tools, of which I've used many over the years. In this article, I review a few TUI-based admin tools and applications and point out some tools you can use to create your own TUIs to meet your needs.
User Interface
About everyone in the world uses a graphical user interface (GUI) to access their desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. The interface's icons and visual indicators, with some text as a secondary form of input, were developed because command-line interfaces (CLIs) were perceived to be slow and inefficient and could not present graphical images and volumetric data easily. Pretty much every operating system on any device uses a GUI: Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, desktops, laptops, phones, tablets, ATM machines, and so on. They are the number one way for people to interact with computer systems with a mouse, finger, or stylus.
To utilize a GUI, you need to have some
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