Use the best system for the job
I'm OS agnostic - always have been. Used to work with Andrew Fernie (post above) and he speaks sense. You use whatever system is best for the job. In my mind there are a lot of blokes out there who have cut their teeth in large organisations, used a raft of different systems but because of the size of the organisation weren't allowed to do any REAL sys admin stuff. I'm taking all menu driven sys admin.
I cut my teeth getting down and dirty with DOS, Win3.x, Win9x, NT4, Solaris, Centos, AiX, OS/400, MacOS, etc. I grew up in the days before GUI and have always been comfortable with the command-line. However, use whatever you have at your disposal. If there is a pretty GUI tool which will do the job as well the command-line, why not use it?
As far as the scripting thing goes... If you can automate it by whatever means then do it. I've done some really elegant stuff that I am still proud of to this day as well as some really horrible kludges where one script generated a flat file, another script read the flat file, processed it a bit and spat out another flat file. Hey, if it works with the tools that you have at hand then do it.
My only request is that you document it with comments and user guides!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
