Re: System administration with GNOME.

[Christian Schaller <Uraeus linuxrising org>]

There is a couple of nice Gnome-based administration tools out there, which
might be of interest as a starting point:

The first one is Gecco  (GNOME Extensible Configuration COnsole) written by
John Vivian and hosted at
http://gecco.sourceforge.net/
It has progressed quite a bit and already features some nice plugins.

The second alternative is Stormix Linux's SAS tool. It is GNOME-based and is
set up with support for remote administration which I think is nice.
Some more information is here:
http://www.stormix.com/products/sas/index_html

Both projects are of course GPL.

I don't know if either of these projects conform or can easily be modified
to conform to the spesifications that Miguel listed, but they already have
developers working on them so using them as a starting point do give the
Gnome project a flying start in this area.

Just an idea, use or discars
Christian Schaller

Miguel de Icaza wrote:

> Hello guys,
>
>    One subject we have avoided during a long time in GNOME was the one
> of writing system administration tools.  As time passes, it becomes
> more obvious that we must address this to offer users a complete
> desktop solution.
>
>    We need to define a central place where configuration tools for the
> system could be launched and write the tools.
>
>    I am inclined to think that we can do all these tools using
> Python/GNOME or Perl/GNOME for most of these tasks.  So we need to get
> volunteers to work on the various things.
>
>    A few things:
>
>       1. Ideally we want to split the core of the work from the User
>          Interface, for exaple in Perl we would have a routine that
>          does all the work:
>
>               sub set_date {
>                   my ($date) = @_;
>
>                   ...
>               };
>
>               lots_of_gui_stuff ();
>               set_date ($result_from_gui);
>
>           So that eventually we could wrap "set_date" as a CORBA
>           service (using Owen's nice ORBit-Perl stuff)
>
>        2. I used to fear that tools that would work on BSD would not
>           work properly on Linux or in some brand of Linux.
>
>           I think we just need to keep a file around, say in
>           $sysconfig/properties that would contain any unique
>           properties of a system.
>
>           For example:
>                 mail_mailer=/usr/sbin/sendmail
>                 mail_locking=dot-locking
>
>           And so on.  The basic idea being that we do not even have to
>           worry too much about this issue.  When the problem arises,
>           we add the new key, and we add the new code to handle it.
>
>           No over-designing of things here, or we will never get it done.
>
>         3. Non GNOME front-ends are not a priority for now, but are
>            still possible (specially if we do the function split I
>            suggested above).
>
>            For doing that, using Perl for example, we could have:
>
>                 useradmin_core.pl
>                 useradmin_gnome.pl
>                 useradmin_web.pl
>
>            And both the GNOME and the Web main programs would invoke
>            the "core" routines in useradmin_core.pl
>
>         4. I can set up a mailing list to discuss this if there is
>            enough interest.
>
>     So who wants to help? ;-)
>
> Cheers,
> Miguel.
>
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