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BlogLinode[RFC] New Member’s User Interface – Dashboard

[RFC] New Member’s User Interface – Dashboard

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https://www.linode.com/members/index.cfm?redirect=/members/dashboard.cfm

No more jumping around to create/edit/delete images and config profiles.

Thoughts?

-Chris


Comments (15)

  1. Author Photo

    something minor, that i looked for, under both the hdd space and ram space,

    ram says max (but doesnt say how much)
    hdd says its numbers

    can we have totals?

    ie my swap + my hdd = a total of something out of something?

    only minor, it looks great 😀

    Cheers

  2. Author Photo
  3. Author Photo

    Looks good. Better quick glance at what’s going on. My only comment would be possibly to re-order the content. From personal experience the configurations and disks are the least used or viewed. I know I’ve made a change there once in 2 years — when we all got more disk space. Besides that I’ve never needed it.

    For me the order would be CPU/Network usage, Job queue, then configs and disk.

    What about making it configurable what’s displayed… or the order.. per user? Probably entirely unnecessary — but hey, maybe you will. 🙂

    –Angelo

  4. Author Photo

    [quote:0826c1b192=”caker”]
    No more jumping around to create/edit/delete images and config profiles.
    [/quote]

    It is rare to do these jobs so I think it is better to jump around. So with regard to images and profiles I much prefer the current layout.

    [quote:0826c1b192=”caker”]
    Thoughts?
    [/quote]

    I do like the idea of a dashboard, but I think my layout design is better than yours :wink:: http://www.buroteq.com/tmp/linode-dash.png (my cut-n-paste job with The Gimp, 223KB)

    I think that when there are no active/ pending jobs, the job history should be hidden so that only the "host Job Queue" heading is displayed. The CPU usage graph will then be higher up the display.

    Anyway, that’s my 2 cents,

    Cliff

  5. Author Photo

    A revision: links to functions are grouped into relevant dashboard boxes rather than the sidebar menus:

    http://www.buroteq.com/tmp/linode-dash-rev1.png (218KB)

    Cliff

  6. Author Photo

    The ‘Configuration Profiles’ list shows which profile was last booted, but how do I select the config to be used at the next (unattended) reboot? There used to be a check box to select the default, didn’t there?

  7. Author Photo

    [quote:222fb0296a=”pclissold”]The ‘Configuration Profiles’ list shows which profile was last booted, but how do I select the config to be used at the next (unattended) reboot? There used to be a check box to select the default, didn’t there?[/quote]
    Yes, but it never did anything. Host Initiated reboots use the last used configuration profile.

    -Chris

  8. Author Photo

    I agree with [b]Internet[/b], it would be nicer if the network graphs were at the top, then jobs, and then configurations. Configuration is the thing I’m least likely to look at on the panel.

  9. Author Photo

    I have to say I prefer the original.

    The dashboard is very cluttered and contains lots of things I hardly ever look at.

    I don’t care about config profiles and disk images unless I’m changing them. They don’t need to be on the front page.

    I don’t care about the job queue unless I’ve asked the host to do something. They don’t need to be on the front page. Especially if the host isn’t executing any jobs for me.

    I don’t use the graphs at all.

    I only use the stuff in the right hand column and now I have to scroll to see it.

    I can’t access the old screen to do further comparisons.

    What was there before was perfectly fine. I don’t see a reason why it was necessary to change it.

  10. Author Photo

    I really like the new dashboard. It provides all of the information that I need/use in one place. People seem to not like one aspect or another, so I’ll give a constructive suggestion:

    Can it be made to be "pluggable" and reorderable, a la some ISP "start pages" where you select what content is shown (via a config screen with checkboxes) and what order different "blocks" of information are shown in (via an ordered list)? This seems like it would appease those who don’t like certain aspects of the new system.

    –Xel

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  12. Author Photo

    I agree with the earlier posts that say that they hardly ever use the configuration profile management. It’s very very rare that I need to change those settings. Same thing for the job management.

    What is most useful to me is the status of things that can change regularly on their own without my intervention, like bandwith usage, and disk usage, etc. I think those types of things should be at the top.

    There’s also something else that’s always bothered me about the disk usage percentage bar; I always have partitions created that fill the available space, and so this bar is always at 100%. Is it possible that the disk usage bar could show how much space is used in the actual filesystem? This is far more useful to me.

  13. Author Photo

    [quote:99f5812677=”kr4z”]There’s also something else that’s always bothered me about the disk usage percentage bar; I always have partitions created that fill the available space, and so this bar is always at 100%. Is it possible that the disk usage bar could show how much space is used in the actual filesystem? This is far more useful to me.[/quote]
    Do you really want the host mounting and examining your filesystems? I don’t.

  14. Author Photo

    [quote:ddb1f4c36a=”zibeli”]Do you really want the host mounting and examining your filesystems? I don’t.[/quote]

    Why not? It already mounts them to create and resize them. There’s not really any chance of anything going wrong if they’re mounted read-only. There’s also probably other ways to get the info without mounting them directly. For example, the kernel could be patched to return disk usage info to the host. There’s already patches to the linode kernel to do things like disable the updatedb cron job by removing the executable bit.

  15. Author Photo

    [quote:875e247fb8=”kr4z”][quote:875e247fb8=”zibeli”]Do you really want the host mounting and examining your filesystems? I don’t.[/quote]

    Why not? It already mounts them to create and resize them. There’s not really any chance of anything going wrong if they’re mounted read-only. There’s also probably other ways to get the info without mounting them directly. For example, the kernel could be patched to return disk usage info to the host. There’s already patches to the linode kernel to do things like disable the updatedb cron job by removing the executable bit.[/quote]
    Except for the swap image I use all "raw" images and create a reiserfs on them so as far as I know nothing else accesses them, but yes, if you use the linode-formatted images it must to create/resize the filesystem. I don’t know the details of how the updatedb thing works (e.g. whether it’s a kernel patch), but according to [url]https://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1634[/url] it does mount the filesystem. At any rate, while it’s not really a big deal and by no means guarantees any security, I guess my preference would just be to avoid having another host mount my filesystems unless really necessary, and just to show me a graph of information I can readily get by typing "df" comes nowhere close to necessary imho.

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