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Control panel debate: I switched back to command line

General Discussion by prague1983 7 replies 1.1K views
prague1983

Member OP

btw I use Arch

#1

After five years of cPanel and then switching to a "modern" panel at my new gig, I have had it. The GUI is always three clicks away from what I need. Updates break the theme. Team members click wrong buttons and I clean up.

I went back to raw Debian, ansible, and a text editor. My deploys are faster. My server footprint is smaller. I sleep fine.

I know the counter-arguments. Onboarding juniors. "Bus factor." But I am starting to think panels are a crutch that creates the problem they claim to solve. You learn the panel, not the system.

Who else has gone back? Did your team revolt? Am I just a dinosaur who will regret this when I am on vacation and someone needs to fix a mailbox?

oops: 0000 [#1] SMP
JU

Member

3 #2

You will regret vacation. Guaranteed.

cpanelliw780

Member

shared hosting survivor

#3

Haha skill issue just use ansible and document it I did this at my last shop and the junior cried for three days then got it panels are for people who dont want to learn but to be honest the team onboarding is real double spaced we kept a panel for client stuff but infra is all cli best of both worlds bus factor is just documentation with extra steps

danfra

Member

4 #4

Panel or CLI does not matter for DDoS response. What matters: can you null-route in under 90 seconds? Can you trigger upstream filtering without opening a ticket?

Anycast + automated RTBH > any panel. 340 Gbps attack last month, mitigated in 45 seconds. No GUI involved.

Your method is fine if your runbooks work at 3 AM.

mitigated 800Gbps before breakfast
pieter_rtm

Member

#5

Specs from our last migration:

  • Panel environment: 4 GB RAM baseline, 120 second provision time
  • CLI/ansible: 512 MB RAM baseline, 15 second provision time
  • Team onboarding panel: 2 days functional, 2 weeks confident
  • Team onboarding CLI: 2 weeks functional, 2 months confident

The cost is not preference. The cost is salary during ramp-up and error rate during learning. We use CLI for prod, panel for client-managed VMs. Dry humor: this way everyone is slightly unhappy, which is optimal.

Containers before it was cool
tomchan

Member

#6

It actually works. 

# my entire "panel"
alias sites='ls /etc/nginx/sites-enabled'
alias logs='tail -f /var/log/nginx/*.log'

For my day job though? We require a panel. Not because the team likes it. Because our team lead got burned when the last senior quit and took three weeks of undocumented knowledge with him. The panel requirement is about bus factor and documentation, not personal preference. He told me this in a 1:1 after I pushed for CLI-only.

That changed my mind a bit. The panel enforces a schema. CLI enforces nothing without discipline most teams lack.

works on my bench ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
RAJ

Member

#7

Ansible doesn't fix the vacation problem cleardmitri raised

your margin is my opportunity
mediaaustin

Member

Deliverability Nerd

#8

Panel enforces schema is a good point, I admit

SPF, DKIM, DMARC — holy trinity ✉️

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