Hey there:
I'm a new participant on this list. I'm the technology coordinator
at a youth development and organizing NGO in southwest Chicago
U.S.A. We're really trying to pull together our CTC, and I'm trying
to make smart decisions ... on the cheap. The existing network
infrastructure for the whole organization is Windows 2000 & XP and
Mac OS X clients. They all are served by a trio of FreeBSD 5.4
machines, one which is devoted to serving the CTC only.
Our CTC will soon expand to contain 25-30 computers. 10 XP, 10 Mac,
and the rest will be some-Linux-or-other. We run English and Spanish
language training programs in basic technology, office applications,
and multimedia and web design. The after school, GED, and ESL
programs occasionally use the CTC too.
I am trying to follow the advice of an experienced CTC manager who
urged me to get my user accounting and usage tracking scheme together
NOW. By that I mean login and logout times for users and
workstations and maybe application usage. All the off-the-shelf
(whether closed source or free/open source) applications I've seen
are single platform. Many depend on a Windows server OS. Nothing
that I've seen is cross platform.
Fortunately, I have a good array of services and technologies that I
think can make up half the puzzle:
OpenLDAP runs the show. All user information is kept in a LDAP
accessible directory, and this conveniently allows us to store
geographic, personal, and demographic information which is useful for
audits and reports. NSS_LDAP and PAM_LDAP play a supporting role so
that email accounts, Samba domain membership, and other applications
are all authenticated against this one source. Shortly, the LDAP
directory serve up all its person-related data to our in-house
participation and impact measurement database applications. This bit
factors into a terribly outrageous, pie-in-the-sky geek fantasy,
which I'll detail below.
Users of the CTC will have their own system accounts complete with a
home directory. If it were a Windows only lab, I could use roaming
profiles or something, but in this heterogeneous environment, I think
this just invites clutter, bloat, and confusion. All these systems
have to be equal members of the CTC so that there can be a very high
common denominator for the three platforms: all computers can be
internet clients, all can run the basic office applications, and all
can access the same network resources. Windows machines use Samba to
connect to the domain and home directories while Mac OS X and Linux
bind to the LDAP directory and get their home directories with NFS.
So with all this very flexible, agnostic and compatible
infrastructure, the only missing link that I've noticed so far is the
application or script on the client machine that can capture usage
data and do something with it that is consistent on all the
platforms. The geek fantasy I was talking about involves a little
Perl or Java SOAP client which posts usage log entries directly to
the participation and impact measurement database. I can already see
the eyes rolling back in the heads of people who have to wait for the
launch of the Java Virtual Machine each time they log into a
workstation! I can be reasonable and down-to-earth too...
1. Am I reinventing the wheel?
2. All this focus on the client machines... could server logs be
holding that data already? (Probably not for individual client
applications!)
3. And the big one... how on earth do I figure out how to do this?
4. Considering that this whole problem is contingent on a particular
set of free/open source software that already demands a good amount
of customization and tuning, how could lessons and products derived
from solving this problem be shared and exploited in other CTCs? How
could good design make this universal, extensible, and modular?
Anything else? Thanks for reading!
Cheers,
Benjamin J Doherty
Southwest Youth Collaborative
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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