Ubuntu Server graphical interface?

[Serge van Ginderachter]

Hi folks,


My 2 cents along the line.


I'm picking into this discussion, and spit out some different thought on the matter, to broaden the subject.
Some of these thought might be off-topic for this thread, but I'm pretty confident they are very on topic on this list.

I'm looking at this, as a former 100% MS shop engineer, having worked for different small businesses, and with the needs to quickly setup an environment for small workgroups. And with 'small' I mean lots of workgroups strating from a coouple of users up to somewhere between 15 or 30 users. The needs are comparable to what one needs for say 75 users, but the budget is very different. That's where a product like Microsoft Small Business Server rules most networks. Technically, it sucks, but for basic stuff, it hgets the job done.


----- "Martin Hess" <martinhess at mac.com> wrote:

> Serge has pointed out what should probably be a 5th requirement.
> * Easy to use
> No point in having a GUI that is difficult to use. Windows is full of 
> examples of such GUIs and gave GUIs a bad name. Additionally, if the 
> tool makes it possible to manage a set of machines at the expense of 
> managing 1 machine easily then it has failed the ease of use test.

When I'm making an assessment of what is needed, I distinct two big things:

1. some gui for *basic* day to day configuration, the kind of stuff a power user @customer needs to manage himself
 - first en foremost, user management, including central and single authentication, and ideally linked to other things that are important to a user:
    * email address and mailbox management
    * managing access to network resources, and managing the desktop environment so the user easily connects to them (eg. shared network drives)
 - managing updates
 - managing ip addresses, dns, dhcp, ...
 - managing shared printers
2. easy setup and management for all hosts belonging to a network
  I can't hold myself to compare to the Microsoft "domain" model, where lots of basic stuff is easily centrally managed

> Here is the requirements list so far:
> 
> 1) Optional - must not be required for Ubuntu Server
> 2) Secure - must not have known security issues, must have good known 
> security architecture
> 3) Scalable - must be able to administer sets of machines
> 4) Open Source
> 5) Easy to use - for 1 or more machines
> 
> Are there any packages that can meet such requirements?

Not AFAIK.

 - ebox is a starter, but only manages a local pc, not a network domain
 - landscape does some basic stuff, also, but is way to basic imho. and it doesnt handle central authentication. and it's not free software
    read up on http://www.vanginderachter.be/2008/canonical-landscape-for-ubuntu/ for more of my thoughts on this;

Some other thoughts:

* What we really need is a framework for this. Make a good framework, and GUI stuff will follow. Making some GUIS to solve all problems without being able to operate by CLI is not the way to go.
* one of the lead projects to take into acount, imho, is Samba 4, which would be the Active Directory tool on open SOurce. Samba is becoming more and more the de facto standard for a lot of stuff, and might be the project to pick to further standardize on.
* eg. LDAP is a standard, but there is no standard address book scheme, which all mail clients adhere to. 
* there ain't something as a standard Samba implementation

As Martin noted, it's about ease of use. All of this stuff already exists. But there just isn't a standardized way to implement it. It's pretty stupid for having to reinvent the wheel for each small customer.

I'm looking forward on other people's thoughts on all of this and more.



        Serge

 Serge van Ginderachter          http://www.vanginderachter.be/ 

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