linuxcoe-devel

[Linuxcoe-devel] GOSA and LinuxCOE

[Bruno C. <Bru...@hp...>]

Hello,

Some of you may know I'm interested in producing a dploy.org project
gathering LinuxCOE, Mondorescue, mrepo and additional glue between all
those bricks.

During my visit of Solutions Linux 2009 in Paris
(http://solutionslinux.fr/), I encountered Benoit Mortier, who is working 
for OpenSides (http://www.opensides.be/) and contributes to the GOSA
project (http://freshmeat.net/projects/gosa).

Gosa is a framework providing a management Web interface for users,
groups, systems, ... based around an LDAP server. Everything is stored
in LDAP, making it easy for inter-systems communication and queries +
allows easy HA and replication.
Demo at https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/wiki/demo

And also exists GOSA-SI which provides deployment services for systems
based on GOSA + a DHCP+LDAP patch and a TFTP+LDAP server. Which makes
deployment very easy using that infrastructure. In fact much simpler and
dynamic that what I was working on :-)

They work mostly with Debian, and this system has been developed for the
city of Munich (DE) and supports thousands of systems.

Benoit kindly offered 3 hours of his time to explain me how all that was
working, and I really think that my Dploy.org idea should migrate to
that platform as:

0/ It's GPL
1/ They have a nice Web interface, much better than what I ever could
code (written in PHP + Templates).
2/ They have a plugin interface so making addition of services as easy
as possible.
3/ They are using perl for GOSA-SI plugins
4/ They do not have an imaging solution. So I could plug Mondorescue.
5/ They have support for Linux, LTSP and Windows deployment but using
   only FAI (Linux) and opsi (Windows)
6/ They use trac for their infra (I love ;-)
7/ They plan on an OCS Inventory integration
8/ They even have packages (deb and rpm)

We could work with them to integrate LinuxCOE as is, and benefit from
the nice Web interface they have on top of LinuxCOE.

Then I think that LinuxCOE could provide code to enhance their project,
allowing them to have native deployment support for RPM based distro.
They already have a profile notion, not sure how that's overlaping.
They do not have replay feature.

What do you think ?
Bruno.
-- 
Linux Profession Lead EMEA  / Open Source Ambassador \   EMEA CME Sol. Center
http://www.mondorescue.org / HP/Intel Solution Center \  http://hpintelco.net
Des infos sur Linux?  http://www.HyPer-Linux.org      http://www.hp.com/linux
La musique ancienne?  http://www.musique-ancienne.org http://www.medieval.org

Re: [Linuxcoe-devel] GOSA and LinuxCOE

[Cat O. <ca...@re...>]

On Sun, 5 Apr 2009, Bruno Cornec wrote:
> Gosa is a framework providing a management Web interface for users,
> groups, systems, ... based around an LDAP server. Everything is stored
> in LDAP, making it easy for inter-systems communication and queries +
> allows easy HA and replication.
> Demo at https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/wiki/demo

I'll say straight up that I haven't gone to look at this yet, but I'm
wondering how much of 'everything' is stored in LDAP.  I've had rather
poor results with storing 'large' datasets in LDAP (vs storing things
like users, groups, small configlets...)

> They work mostly with Debian, and this system has been developed for the
> city of Munich (DE) and supports thousands of systems.

Nice!

> Benoit kindly offered 3 hours of his time to explain me how all that was
> working, and I really think that my Dploy.org idea should migrate to
> that platform as:
>
> 0/ It's GPL

Which GPL?  Does it play nicely with other licences?

> 1/ They have a nice Web interface, much better than what I ever could
> code (written in PHP + Templates).
> 2/ They have a plugin interface so making addition of services as easy
> as possible.
> 3/ They are using perl for GOSA-SI plugins
> 4/ They do not have an imaging solution. So I could plug Mondorescue.
> 5/ They have support for Linux, LTSP and Windows deployment but using
>   only FAI (Linux) and opsi (Windows)
> 6/ They use trac for their infra (I love ;-)

*grin* Quite!

> 7/ They plan on an OCS Inventory integration
> 8/ They even have packages (deb and rpm)

Hm... how do they handle patching and revision diffs?

> We could work with them to integrate LinuxCOE as is, and benefit from
> the nice Web interface they have on top of LinuxCOE.
>
> Then I think that LinuxCOE could provide code to enhance their project,
> allowing them to have native deployment support for RPM based distro.
> They already have a profile notion, not sure how that's overlaping.
> They do not have replay feature.
>
> What do you think ?

Could be interesting!

cheers!
==========================================================================
"A cat spends her life conflicted between a deep, passionate and profound
desire for fish and an equally deep, passionate and profound desire to
avoid getting wet.  This is the defining metaphor of my life right now."

Re: [Linuxcoe-devel] GOSA and LinuxCOE

[Bruno C. <Bru...@hp...>]

Cat Okita said on Sun, Apr 05, 2009 at 12:09:18AM -0400:

>> Demo at https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/wiki/demo
>
> I'll say straight up that I haven't gone to look at this yet, but I'm
> wondering how much of 'everything' is stored in LDAP.  I've had rather
> poor results with storing 'large' datasets in LDAP (vs storing things
> like users, groups, small configlets...)

My "everything" is in fact everything you need to do network deployment.
So MAC addr + IP addr of the machine e.g. so that the static allocation
can be done automagically by a pathed LDAP DHCP. 

Also they have the boot line info so that the pxelinux.cfg/01-mad-addr
file could be generated on the fly by their LDAP aware TFTP server.

And as most of that is read operation, then perf should be pretty
correct (didn't try myself up to now).

Now I'm not an LDAP guru, but found the idea retty neat.

>> 0/ It's GPL
> Which GPL?  Does it play nicely with other licences?

Didn't had time to submit to fossology to check, but the official
license is GPL (https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/wiki/WikiStart) with
text of GPLv3 (seems to have been adopted in 2008:
https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/changeset/12202) but also of GPLv2
https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/browser/trunk/gosa-core/COPYING

>> 7/ They plan on an OCS Inventory integration
>> 8/ They even have packages (deb and rpm)
> Hm... how do they handle patching and revision diffs?

Of course they have a VCS which is in their case SVN (fits nicely with
trac). So I plan on looking at making packages from SVN with
project-builder in order to ba able to follow closely the evolutions of
the project (at least for my side with MondoRescue).

> Could be interesting!

Indeed ;-)
Thabks for your feedback Cat !

Bruno.
-- 
Linux Profession Lead EMEA  / Open Source Ambassador \   EMEA CME Sol. Center
http://www.mondorescue.org / HP/Intel Solution Center \  http://hpintelco.net
Des infos sur Linux?  http://www.HyPer-Linux.org      http://www.hp.com/linux
La musique ancienne?  http://www.musique-ancienne.org http://www.medieval.org

Re: [Linuxcoe-devel] GOSA and LinuxCOE

[Bryan G. <bry...@hp...>]

Bruno,

On Sat, Apr 04, 2009 at 11:59:53PM +0000, Cornec, Bruno (Open Source and Linux Technology Architect) wrote:
> Some of you may know I'm interested in producing a dploy.org project
> gathering LinuxCOE, Mondorescue, mrepo and additional glue between all
> those bricks.
> 
> During my visit of Solutions Linux 2009 in Paris
> (http://solutionslinux.fr/), I encountered Benoit Mortier, who is working 
> for OpenSides (http://www.opensides.be/) and contributes to the GOSA
> project (http://freshmeat.net/projects/gosa).

Nice.

> Gosa is a framework providing a management Web interface for users,
> groups, systems, ... based around an LDAP server. Everything is stored
> in LDAP, making it easy for inter-systems communication and queries +
> allows easy HA and replication.
> Demo at https://oss.gonicus.de/labs/gosa/wiki/demo
> 
> And also exists GOSA-SI which provides deployment services for systems
> based on GOSA + a DHCP+LDAP patch and a TFTP+LDAP server. Which makes
> deployment very easy using that infrastructure. In fact much simpler and
> dynamic that what I was working on :-)

Even better.

> They work mostly with Debian, and this system has been developed for the
> city of Munich (DE) and supports thousands of systems.
> 
> Benoit kindly offered 3 hours of his time to explain me how all that was
> working, and I really think that my Dploy.org idea should migrate to
> that platform as:
> 
> 0/ It's GPL
> 1/ They have a nice Web interface, much better than what I ever could
> code (written in PHP + Templates).
> 2/ They have a plugin interface so making addition of services as easy
> as possible.
> 3/ They are using perl for GOSA-SI plugins
> 4/ They do not have an imaging solution. So I could plug Mondorescue.
> 5/ They have support for Linux, LTSP and Windows deployment but using
>    only FAI (Linux) and opsi (Windows)
> 6/ They use trac for their infra (I love ;-)
> 7/ They plan on an OCS Inventory integration
> 8/ They even have packages (deb and rpm)
> 
> We could work with them to integrate LinuxCOE as is, and benefit from
> the nice Web interface they have on top of LinuxCOE.

Even better.  And sounds similar to the integration I've been helping
with for the openQRM project ( http://www.openqrm.com/ ).

> Then I think that LinuxCOE could provide code to enhance their project,
> allowing them to have native deployment support for RPM based distro.
> They already have a profile notion, not sure how that's overlaping.
> They do not have replay feature.
> 
> What do you think ?

Go for it, full steam ahead. IMHO, the more integration aspects, the better,
and follows the "tool" mentality, where each does what's best.

bryang