Hi. I'm honing to sound like a total noob here but please have patience I'm trying like hell to catch up. Lol.
I'm about to setup Rsync to transfer files to a backup machine.
So I'm looking around the internet for people's best practices and opinions. I'm noticing that many of the admins are doing things in a combo of GUI in desktop and cmd line opposed to strictly cmd line in server.
I'm from the Windows world and I think that having a point and click environment would help me move quicker.
Can you guys tell me why I wouldn't want to use Ubuntu desktop? Or is there a better desktop to use for admin tasks?
Thanks in advance.
Justin.
There’s nothing terribly wrong with using Ubuntu as a desktop – at the very least, it has good hardware support, and it’s now the leading desktop (AFAIK) so 3rd parties (like Google) support it.
I recommend you stick to the LTS versions unless you like living on the bleeding edge.
However, there is generally no such thing as a GUI that runs on a desktop to let you manage a server. Unlike Windows, your choice of desktop/server combination is largely irrelevant here.
If you pick Ubuntu Server or Debian, you’ll get a reasonably-stable, well-supported server that uses the same command-line tools as your desktop for management.
If you pick RHEL/CentOS for your server, you’ll get a reasonably-stable, well-supported server that uses 90% of the same command-line tools as your desktop for management.
If you want a GUI to manage a server, you’re largely limited to tools like Webmin (www.webmin.com http://www.webmin.com ) and its ilk, and at that point, you could as easily manage your server from an iPad as from an Ubuntu desktop.
-Adam
From: roundtable-bounces@muug.mb.ca [mailto:roundtable-bounces@muug.mb.ca] On Behalf Of Justin Richard Sent: October 17, 2016 13:18 To: roundtable@muug.mb.ca Subject: [RndTbl] Ubuntu desktop vs server.
Hi. I'm honing to sound like a total noob here but please have patience I'm trying like hell to catch up. Lol.
I'm about to setup Rsync to transfer files to a backup machine.
So I'm looking around the internet for people's best practices and opinions. I'm noticing that many of the admins are doing things in a combo of GUI in desktop and cmd line opposed to strictly cmd line in server.
I'm from the Windows world and I think that having a point and click environment would help me move quicker.
Can you guys tell me why I wouldn't want to use Ubuntu desktop? Or is there a better desktop to use for admin tasks?
Thanks in advance.
Justin.
On 2016-10-17 Justin Richard wrote:
I'm about to setup Rsync to transfer files to a backup machine.
So I'm looking around the internet for people's best practices and opinions. I'm noticing that many of the admins are doing things in a combo of GUI in desktop and cmd line opposed to strictly cmd line in server.
If you're talking about whether to use rsync at the command line vs finding a gui for it, it's best to learn the command line. If you're trying to do backups, try using these options:
*** see notes below before running this! It can delete your files! ***
rsync -vaxHAX /source/ user@desthost:/dest/
The only tricky part is figuring out if you want to transfer source dir and below or the contents of source/ (with a slash). I find it easier to always use a trailing slash on source/.
But you don't even need to really be an expert or remember the slash, just make sure you specify --dry-run (or -n) and look at what rsync is doing as a "dry run" (no files are actually copied/deleted) and ensure it's all okie dokie before taking out the --dry-run to actually do the backup. Once you're sure it's all good, put your command line in a script or alias (or cron) and use that to run it whenever you need it.
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Adam Thompson -
Justin Richard -
Trevor Cordes