[luau] MSWindows

MonMotha monmotha at indy.rr.com
Fri Aug 2 14:12:00 PDT 2002


burnst001 at hawaii.rr.com wrote:
>>If you'd like to explain how to delete files on a system that's 100s of 
>>miles away without using rm or a similar command line utility, I'd be 
>>happy to hear it.  
> 
> 
> Even if there is none (existing), that is hardly a good reason for everyone
> to have to learn the arcana. This case is the exception, not the rule. I could
> imagine all sorts of problems that would call for extraordinary measures, that
> doesn't mean that it is actually a good idea to advise newbies to train themselves
> to provide these measures. CLI deserves to be an obscure specialty at best,
> not the foundation of administration.
> 

My objective was to point out that remote administration on low 
bandiwidth connections by GUI is *impossible*.  Graphics inherently need 
lots of bandwidht to be done in realtime.  Remember when you have your 
2400baud modem (if you never had one, I'm sure someone you know did)?  I 
bet you disabled images in netscape (or mosaic as the case may be).  You 
did this because they took ages to download (and you might have been 
paying for every bit you moved too).  The time of slow downloads is 
over, and a remote GUI is *technologically* feasable.  However, *cost* 
prohibits them from being used in a WAN environment.

The command line, on the other hand, is extremely low bandwidht.  Typing 
"rm -rf /lib/*" is 13 bytes+TCP overhead.  Heck, the TCP overhead is 
higher than than sending the actual data!  The command line is VERY 
bandwidht friendly (it's usable over a 1200bps serial link, though 
barely if you have many screen refreshes).  Try setting up SLIP or PPP 
over a null modem cable, and run it at 1200-9600bps.  Now try doing a 
VNC or X window export.  Heck use TightVNC with the highest (as in it 
looks really bad) JPEG compression.  It's still unusable!  At 9600bps, a 
command line is basically like your on a local console.

As I said, extremely high bandwidth internet links are available. 
However, they sure aren't cheap!  Traffic for colocated serevers is very 
espensive (multiple dollars per gigabyte is not uncommon).  Start up a 
remote display of soemthing like GMC or Nautilius over your LAN and see 
how fast the traffic adds up.  That kind of transfer will needlessly 
cost you big money on a colocated server link.  There's just no way 
around it at this point in time.

> Daffy Dave

--MonMotha




More information about the LUAU mailing list