Better testing of read-only access

[northlandboy]

If you work in a small shop, you tend to log in read-write most of the time. No problem.

If you've spent time in a large, complex shop, you'll know that it doesn't always work that way. Either someone else is logged in already, or you have multiple levels of access. Perhaps you have a design team, who are only allowed read-only access. Whatever, it means that you use read-only a lot. My personal practice is to always log in read-only if I'm not planning on making changes - partly so that anyone who needs to make changes can log in, and partly to ensure that I don't change anything unintentionally.

Everyone who has used read-only extensively will be well aware of the failings. What I find particularly annoying is that things will sometimes regress - e.g. the ability to run "Where Used" queries was there at FP2, then went at FP3. Luckily it's back now. R60 you lost the ability to look at the topology of a cluster properly - you couldn't scroll down. There's a few other things where you can't look at all the detail in read-only too.

The SmartMap warning ("SmartMap cannot be created in read-only mode") is especially annoying to me, and pointless. OK, you told me once, no need to tell me every single time I log in.

Occasionally there will be a field that you can edit, even though you are read only (nb you can't save changes though). E.g. Yesterday, running R55, looking at the Remote Access tab of a Cluster - the "Support visitor mode" checkbox was available to me, even though I was read only.

For bonus marks, sometimes information will not be there - e.g. at R54, one I sometimes saw in Global Properties, -> Management HA, was that the time object would not be there in read-only, but would be visible in read-write. So logging in read-only, you thought there was no scheduled sync - but there was.

You get the feeling that read-only is not extensively tested, and that people within CheckPoint use read-write all the time. I'd like to see read-only better tested, so that everything works as it should. Not just can you log in read-only, but do things display correctly, is it functional? Stuff like the cluster topology one should have been pretty easy to pick up.