Ubuntu Server graphical interface?

[Jonathan Jesse]

On Sun, May 4, 2008 at 3:44 PM, Serge van Ginderachter <
serge at vanginderachter.be> wrote:

>
> 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/
>
>  Kreeg u een "odt" bestand en kan u deze niet openen? Zie
> http://ginsys.be/odf
>
> --
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> ubuntu-server at lists.ubuntu.com
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> More info: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam
>

The "GUI" should be web based. And the framework needs to store information
in an open database, that is a databse that can be accessed, plugged into
and added to
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