Hi! OME 2.0.1 is very useful but there are a lot of annoyances that make it difficult to use, or impossible to use in certain situations.
According to @DellCaresPRO, the best way to give feedback to the OME developers is to post on this forum. Here are a number of my bug reports / suggestions.
1. Make the task names useful.
The list of jobs running in the background is frustrating. You have to double-click on an item to see what a task actually is. The "Task Name" shouldn't be "System Update Task -- [date]". It should be "Update [hostname, hostname, hostname]".
Here's a screenshot. You can't tell what any of these tasks are:
everythingsysadmin.com/.../screencapture_2015-08-11_9.19.39%20AM-thumb-400xauto-104.png
To use this list, you have to double-click each task to see what they're actually doing. That's ok if I have 1-2 jobs running, but I have dozens.
To put this in the form of a bug: Task names should default to a description of what is being done, not the date the job was submitted. For example: "Update hostname1, hostname2, hostname3".
2. The UI obscures the common options.
The primary reason I use OME is to upgrade firmware. To do that you have to click "Manage" (2nd item), "System Update" (5th item), "Non-Compliant Systems" (3rd item). I think it is good UI design to have the most frequent menu items early in the menu. The UI as it stands obscures this very common task.
My suggestion is to put a couple "shortcut" buttons in the banner. For example a button called "Update Firmware" that leads you directly to "Non-compliant systems". One click and I'm ready to work.
3. Linux "in-band" updates requires one to adopt bad security practices.
In-band updates can work one of two ways. (a) provide the root credentials, (b) provide non-root credentials and let OME "sudo" the commands. Sadly neither of these work.
Option A is a bad idea. The recommended security practice for Linux systems is to forbid logging in directly as root via SSH. Root logins work from the console but not over the network. In fact, this is the default RHEL configuration. Since Dell supports RHEL for their users that use Linux, I'd think that OME would understand this.
Option B doesn't work. The recommended security practice of Sudo is that it should ask the user for their password. OME doesn't seem to work unless sudo is configured to be password-less (the "NOPASSWD:" option).
Is there a way for OME to work without violating these basic security practices?
Suggestion: When using the "sudo" option, handle the situation where sudo prompts for a password.
4. Feature request: Get rid of Silverlight. Microsoft is phasing it out. I hate to say "i told you so", but I am one of the people that's been saying HTML5 will beat Silverlight since the very beginning. So, can we have an HTML5 version?
5. Feature request: Quarterly software updates. It is 2015. Yearly updates only made sense when you had to ship physical CDs (and even then, we wish we had more frequent updates).
6. OME startup time is too long
After entering my credentials OME takes nearly 2 minutes to begin. This is insane. I actually suspect that the UI just delays for a while so we get to see the logo for a while.
7. You can't bookmark anything in the application
There are 2-3 panes in this application that I use most of the time. Why can't I make bookmarks to get me there directly?
8. Defaults when submitting a system update job are terrible.
When telling OME to update the firmware on a non-compliant system, the default should be "now". Currently the default is a few minutes in the future. That doesn't make sense. If I didn't want to do it now, I'd be using some other system. Let me put it this way: THE UI SHOULD HAVE A BIAS TOWARDS SPEED.
Tom