On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 7:24 AM, Dan Shearer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 03, 2008 at 08:00:31PM -0500, Nicolas Valcarcel wrote: > > I have been working on the blueprint of a centralized managment console > : > > > https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubuntu-centralized-services-administrator > > I'm not sure how best to contribute, so I'll start with a few comments > here first. > > Rationale > --------- > > I wonder if the Rationale section is maybe looking at the right things > from the wrong starting point. To me the deeper analysis is: > > Ubuntu Server has no awareness of itself as a product. > > Yast, webmin and the rest don't address this either. Personally I'd be > delighted to stick with existing Ubuntu Server tools for managing > services (thanks, Debian, upstreams!) and just overlay a higher order of > understanding and control. Which, at our later option, we can make as > GUI as we like, or as is required. > > There's a subtle point here that was only hinted at before, I can't > remember who made it. The good thing a lot of us see in the Microsoft > admin tools is that they have this higher order of understanding to some > degree. Not so much just that there is a GUI. And that is where I think > some of the debate on this list has been like ships passing in the > night, people not realising that the others are talking about different > things. I despite a mandatory GUI as much as the next Unix person. But I > recognise value in a network-centric management view, such as delivered > nicely by some GUI tools. > > Outline Sketch Implementation > ----------------------------- > > Following is a sketch of a commandline tool ubuntu-server-admin.py that, > if it existed, would give me confidence that a useful admin tool could > be built on top of it. My tool would be interacting with existing Linux > and Debian management facilities, and would use a database. I have a > clear idea for how the database would work but that's detail. > > u-s-admin --report --overview returns an XML summary file that says: > name = X, otherwise known as Z > services I'm running that matter to users are A,B,C > the locations of my vital data are D, E, F > the network services I depend on are G, H I > the network servers I depend on are J, K, L > the machines to which I log messages are M and N > the machines monitoring me are O and P > > (where I say 'machine' above it is likely 'CNAME' in reality to avoid > hard coding) > > u-s-admin --report --depend-network-services would return: > DNS server details, and their current status > KDC server details and status > : > > u-s-admin --report --depend-network-servers would return: > Server J: rsync for backup, on port X; and current status > Server K: SQL server for webapp we're running; and current status > Server L: web proxy for accellerator for Apache we're running; and > current status > > Given this level of awareness, next we need to configure these things. > The fact of this configuration would not be kept in the database, the > database would only be for the higher-level understanding. This would be > making calls to debconf or apachectl or whatever makes sense, and these > tools just manage state the same way they always did. > > -- > Dan Shearer > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > -- > ubuntu-server mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-server > More info: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam > Dan, I agree that I don't want to see a nice GUI environment, but I do want to be able policies against a group of computers that will report information back to me. So what happens after I do a u-s-admin -report? How does the data get displayed? How can i report against u-s-admin? I would like a list of computers that are my DNS servers in my environment or a list of my SQL servers in the environment? XML is great that once you define that information it can be transmitted/delt with however you want to. Let me think more on this
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