[Config4gnu-developer] Re: alternative roadmap proposal (**and other news**)

[Jason L. <JL...@me...>]

Here are just a few of my thoughts:

1. I don't think the CIM spec is as limited as you guys are making it out
to be. Yes, CIM currently cannot do properties of complex data types, and to
implement hierarchies you'd need to use associations to create parent/child
relationships between the objects. However, for complex properties you could
always use "string" properties to pack more complicated data (even XML) if
needed, and CIM has "qualifiers" that allow you to describe additional
semantics for each property, such as enumerated values, range of acceptable
values, and human-readable descriptions.

Furthermore, the use of associations allow you to connect different CIM
objects in all sorts of ways (not just parent/child relationships), and the
CIM objects you're connecting don't even need to be objects on the same
server. In fact, what I envision is a person who administers many servers
connects to a particular WBEM server, and on this WBEM server there are
links to all the different CIM objects on all the different servers that
represent the many things that can be configured/managed. So you see, you
can still create a group for "servers" and a group for "workstations" and
create entities underneath them to represent the things that can be
configured.

2. Indeed, in my job I administer many servers, of various flavors of
Linux/Unix and other operating systems. It is my intention to make
Config4GNU into something I can use on my job, and if I can't do remote
management with Config4GNU, it's useless. With WBEM, I have a network
protocol, client/server components, and authentication already built.

If I wasn't so concerned about getting a satisfactory remote management
scenario working, I'm sure I would see things differently. In addition, I'm
not interested in investing the amount of personal time it would take to
create our own protocols, authentication schemes and then implement them all
in the current codebase.

--

In other news...

Configuring Samba through the new WBEM-enabled code is largely working.
There are a few aspects on the parser side that are still broken, and the
client-side forms are all currently hard-coded, but I think I can do
anything I want to with an smb.conf file through the Config4GNU software
now. This includes adding/removing properties on shares, adding/removing
shares themselves, setting global properties and default share settings. Oh,
and you can do it on a remote computer too.

Screenshots are available at
http://jason.long.name/config4gnu-wbem/screenshots.html. (You may want to
ignore the Nagios screenshots unless you are also interested in the Nagios
provider.)

Source code for the various components have been imported into the
Sourceforge CVS servers. Check out the modules owperlprovider,
config4gnu-wbem, and cimbrowser.

There are also tarballs and installation instructions available at
http://jason.long.name/config4gnu-wbem/index.html.

Jason