Re: [webmin-devel] Question useradmin layout

[Jamie C. <jca...@we...>]

On Fri, 2003-05-23 at 10:05, Clemens Oertel wrote:
> Hi alltogether,
> 
> while trying to write some to code to synchronize users among multiple 
> machines upon creation/modification/deletion, I noticed that many 
> functionality lies in the corresponding .cgi-files, not in the user-lib.pl.
> 
> My naive idea was to have a useradmin_update.pl file on the master machine, 
> with something like:
> 
> &remote_foreign_call('my_user_synchronizer', 'create', %{$user_reference});
> 
> and on the client machines a module called my_user_synchronizer with a 
> lib-file containing:
> 
> sub create {
> 	my (%user) = @_;
> 
> 	...
> 	&foreign_call('useradmin', 'create_user', \%user);
> 	&foreign_call('useradmin', 'make_changes');
> 	...
> }
> 
> Works great, user gets created (or deleted or whatever).
> However, this way I'm missing all the extended functionality, such as 
> group changes, home dir movings etc. I also don't want to cut'n'paste code out 
> of the respective cgi-scripts (maintainability ...).
> 
> So it occured to me that clean one-function interfaces for each of the user 
> maintenance tasks (create, modify, delete) would be the perfect solution. 
> Maybe with an additional parameter to turn on/off all output.
> 
> Since I'm not aware of the rationale for the current layout of the useradmin 
> module, I'd like to ask for some comments on that issue. MAybe somebody even 
> has found a working solution already?

Unfortunately, there is no single clean function for creating a user
with all the extras at the moment. The only good reason for the current
design is that it allows the creation of users without a home directory,
or without a corresponding Samba account. A few other modules do just
this for creating mailboxes and so on.

So anyway, right now you need to call several functions to create a
user. Have a look at the Cluster Users and Groups module's
create_user.cgi script to see how it is done remotely..

 - Jamie