Idea for a spec

[Etienne Goyer]

Scot McSweeney-Roberts a écrit :
> Etienne Goyer wrote:
>> However, I do not think junior admins, or those unexperienced with Linux
>> coming from other platforms, have the skills to do a good and efficient
>> job of setting up these infrastrucure services.
>>
> 
> My only concern here would be that it would be that even if you make it
> easy to install all those infrastructure services, the junior admins are
> going to be biting off more than can chew (ie, once they want to move
> beyond defaults or if something goes wrong, they'll be lost). I don't
> mean this as a reason not to do it, just that there should be good
> documentation and perhaps even some warnings as well as sensible
> defaults and magic scripts.

Absolutely.  Everything's in the execution.  For the moment, I'm just
jotting a few ideas I have been cogitating about.  Eventually, I will
have to really get into the implementation details, but I just want to
get the bird's eye view across for the moment.


> When is the client added to the domain? I can think of a couple of cases -

Both build-time and ad-hoc would be nice.  I was thinking of
encapsulating this part in a meta-package ("ubuntu-domain-client" or
somesuch), which would in turn bring in all the required packages and
execute the setup script.  But everything is on the table, I have not
thought out all the details.  I think the simpler is the better, at
least at first.


> In either case, what about Dynamic DNS and Zeroconf? That would at least
> add the client into DNS and let it get basic services.

I am not too familiar with these protocols, that's why I left them out
of my initial description.  I think integration of DHCP with Dynamic DNS
is a very good idea I should be investigating.  A good integration of
Zeroconf/Bonjour/SLP/whatever would bring very interesting possibilities
to the table, but as I said, I am not too familiar with these, so I
leave them for the moment.


> As an aside - does Ubuntu's "lack" of root figure impact any of this?
> Installing root's ssh public key won't be of much use if root's not
> turned on.

Indeed.  We could have a local account created specifically for the
domain administrative purpose and added to sudoers, for example.


> I don't think default setups would help much, because once they want to
> step out of the defaults, they're going to be right back to figuring out
> how things work. I think what you really want is an "easy" to use front
> end to all of the domain admin functions.

It depend.  If you work within the defaults, you may not have to really
figure out how things are setup.  But the nice thing about doing it with
standard tools and services is that it is completely transparent, and
you *can* figure it out if you really want to.  It's the best of both
worlds !


Cheers,

Etienne