1y ago

Until there's a community for Enterprise Networking you have to suffer my meme.

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If you're using a GUI, that means whatever you're doing you're not doing a lot of it, since you don't need to automate it. I would expect a world-class enterprise engineer to be able to automate most tasks, and from that they would be very comfortable with the command line.
Can you do everything with a GUI that you can on a command line? Yeah probably, if the developer is at all the features properly. Can you automate it easily? No not at all. So the more you do something the more you tend to want to deal with the vocabulary of the command line because it's more expressive and allows for automation.
I will die on this hill!
- Documentation too. Frontends change all the time, but CLI tools usually don't, so you can usually rely on old documentation. But have you ever tried googling how to do something in MS office, found and article from half a year ago and found that none of the things it mentions exist anymore? It's ridiculous how much time people waste trying to figure out stuff multiple times because it changes so much.
  
  After long periods of not using GUIs, I found myself very confused every time I want to do something. I was trying to insert a code block into Power Point yesterday, took me half an hour of googling and didn't manage to do it. With Latex, I googled and in 2 minutes I had a code block.
  
  Given that Latex is a clusterfuck of legacy, it speaks volumes that it's still so much easier to do things there rather than in powerpoint.
  With MS office I've also adopted a "fuck it, I'll just take a screenshot" approach.
  
  A collection of screenshots send around by mail after having poorly drawn arrows and frames in it, is official documentation. Source: my corporation
  
  Yup, I tried doing it properly too when I started and now I don't give a shit. If the company wants us to use crappy tools, that's what they get.
  
  What are you saying? The project is finished, the new stuff implemented and now you want to buy some fancy software and shedule 100 hours for documentation? We dont need that! Just help out your colleagues, when they have a question. They'll all know what to do in no time!
- Depends on what system you’re running, and especially what task you’re doing. Trying to operate firewall rules via CLI is an exercise in self-inflicted pain, as is trying to set a complex cron schedule without a handy calculator.
  
  on the contrary, CLI is the BEST way to deal with firewall rules.
  
  Personally, I'd take it a step further. Firewall rules should be defined as code in a git repo. So if you're building rules in a gui, you're simply doing it wrong. While a cli and/or api should be used, that should be automated and invisible to a human.
  
  TIL there are people configuring firewalls via GUIs. Okay … I‘m do that too on my private equipment because I’m lazy. But it feels wrong doing so in an enterprise context.
  
  You using a Cisco firewall or something?
  
  I’ve been using F5 in the past. Not doing that anymore though.
  
  Junos CLI is a real treat. I work with the SRX line regularly, particularly the SRX4600 and the SRX300 series.
- CLI debuggers can't hold a candle to the Visual Studio debugger. This is generally not something you automate, and I haven't met many engineers that know gdb well. But pretty much anyone can use VS debugger.

166 comments