Desktop Policy Management for Gnome Desktops
In my search for the perfect ldap/group policy management solution for linux, I’ve found nothing that compares to active directory. While many would argue that openldap is easily as powerful, I would fire back that most businesses are not ready for the high barrier of entry that openldap presents, such as lack of powerful management GUI’s, difficult setup, and in my field the most important issue, no policy management regarding desktop management.
I cannot allow users to use certain features of their desktop. This is the cold hard reality. Active Directory provides the most robust solution on the market in the form of Group Policy Objects. With Group Policy, you can control every facet of the computer experience, which links directly to the group that your user is in, and will run this group policy change at login for the user. So privileged users can install software, but unprivileged users cannot. You may want to give some users the ability to save documents only to network shares, or control what users have what icons on their desktops. The features are endless, and there is a bit of learning curve to implement it properly, which I believe I have mastered at this point.
Convincing an organization to move to an open source desktop platform that has the needs of this type of service is near impossible. I’ve searched through countless forums and blogs, and the only comparable service I can find, is one called Likwise. However, this integrates the active directory platform into linux. I want to REPLACE active directory, hence not relying on proprietary software on my network. Being that Likewise is using some for of gconf editor for the Gnome desktop to do this, I belive what I seek is possible, and just has not been developed yet.
At this point I am looking for guidance. I would like to write a script that imports the settings from a network location. In other words I would have one file that has the desktop configuration for a group of computers made from a gconf editor. I would put a script in crontab to run and query the file for changes every so often, that way desktop changes would take effect when you edit the text file. I’m just brainstorming at this point, but I would love to hear from other on how they are handling these issues.
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2 Comments to Desktop Policy Management for Gnome Desktops
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- @jackljohnson: haha, thanks for the vote of confidence
- wow, just got a call from tech support for a consulting job I did 2 years ago. Um, updateyourrecordsfools.com
- @boondox: If it has to be specifically open source, then you may want to look into programmer or Linux Systems admin
- Totally bummed I can't use themes with Apps. I hate you all.
- I am truly humbled by the amount of support I've been receiving for Linux Basement. Thank you.
Isn’t that what sabayon is all about? It does support nfs mounted policy files if I remember the docs right. Haven’t used it, but it’s on my long list of things to look at…..
It is, but sabayon does not fit my environment. I am wondering what does the policy management in sabayon and if it can be integrated into other distros. It is something I need to look into further as well.