[debian-lan-devel] Debian-LAN: installing a complete network environment

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

Besides "webmin" for master system based authentication, such as Samba or
ypbind work well with? It's workflow dependent. It's not as powerful or
complex as some, but the user interface is pretty good and it's a model of
modularity. I've not had the opportunity to use "swat" with the latest
Samba releases, though it's built in and the developers have paid some
attention with the current release to re-integrate it better since the
Samba release went from 3.x to 4.0.x.

If you're actually going to manage accounts, you have to pick a workflow,
for centralized or localized account management,and propagate them. I tend
to prefer a centralized account mangement system, to control little things
like consistent account names and uids across the enviornment, and avoiding
uid conflicts with previously generated application accounts, demand this.
But you probably know those problems.

I do recommend "webmin" as an example of how to write open source GUI's.
Each module is quite specific, the displays are lightweight and based on
consistent layout standards and legible, and they allow drilling down to
adjust critical details. They also try to use the system's own built-in
config files, rather than complex and inherently destabilizing separate
database backends with inherent impedance matching between the featues of
the config files and the supported features of the database.

For *evaluating* GUI's, I'd go read Eric Raymond's essay on "The Luxury of
Ignorance", with open source GUI guidelines at the end and few of my
suggested guidelines he added, as a postscript.


On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 2:53 AM, Andreas B. Mundt <andi.mundt at web.de> wrote:

> Hi Nico,
>
> thanks for your comments and sharing your experience.
>
> On Sat, Oct 05, 2013 at 10:22:08AM -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> > Agreed about reducing the lists.
> >
>
> [...]
>
> One crucial problem we need to solve is the provision of a graphical
> way to do the basic sysadmin tasks, like adding and removing user
> accounts.  I don't think it's necessary to avoid the command line when
> setting up the machines, but after that, it should be possible to run
> the system and add/remove accounts also by 'non-professionals'.
> (Imagine a system that is set up by a sysadmin, but after the setup
> it's mostly run by non-professionals until further notice).
>
> Can you recommend a tool, perhaps in combination with samba?
>
> Many thanks in advance,
>
>      Andi
>
>
>
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