Linux Basement Presents: Chad’s Blog

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.

After countless hours of scouring the web, the only thing I could do to get rid of these errors was

**DO NOT DO THIS WITHOUT CONSULTING THE NETWORK ADMINISTRATOR**

cd to “\program files\gpmc\scripts” and run “Cscript
GrantPermissionOnAllGPOs.wsf “Enterprise Domain Controllers”
/Permission:Read /Domain:yourdomain.local”.

**This issue can be avoided during upgrade by using “adprep
/domainprep /gpprep” during the domainprep-stage of the domain
upgrade.**

So I’ve pretty
much made the switch over to Ubuntu on my home desktop flawlessly. I
have not run into an instance that it can’t do what I need it to do. I
really thought I would miss Dreamweaver a lot. I know I can mess with
crossover office or wine to get it working, but I’ve not missed it
enough yet. The truth is, most of the web work I’ve been doing has been
over SSH, which I have grown to love and rely on so much, that a lot of
times I’m just editing php right in SSH using nano. No, I’m not talking
about an ipod nano, though I do have one of those and love it. I’m
talking about the linux text editor, nano. Many true linux heads say
that vi is the bomb, but I have not had the time to break through the
learning curve in Vi, so for now, I’m happy with nano.
You can find out more about nano here.

This would probably not work for someone who was heavy into html
editing or CSS, though I seem to do all of that by hand now-a-days too.
I guess it just comes with the territory.

Interestingly enough I think I’m working more efficiently doing
things this way. It also makes me revisit the way I structure my
/var/www files and I keep them much more organized.

Random Thought: I can’t find all the fonts that i want on GIMP. What up with that??

I did run into an interesting predicament today, which interested me
about Ubuntu Studio. I do not see a good video editing suite. Not a
one. I need to do some investigation on how I can splice 3 small movies
onto one disk with a menu that will play in DVD players. I’m sure I’ll
find something, but we’ll see. If anyone has any suggestions for Linux
I welcome them.

Well, it is done. I’ve switched over from windows Vista to Ubuntu 7. More notably Ubuntustudio,
which just released. Ubuntustudio is basically Ubuntu 7 Feisty Fawn,
but pre-installed with lots of goodies for the music/movies/graphics
creator. It is a creative suite OS. So far, I love it, though I have
not delved into trying to set up my usb preamp with linux yet, and I am
dreading doing so, as I can already see there will be quite a learning
curve. All and all though, I love Ubuntu, and have for quite some time
since I’ve been running it on my work laptop.

I made the decision because, well, in my technically busy wolrld, I
don’t have the time to mess with Vista Idiosyncrasies (which by the way
should be the name of the next Vista release). Every time I want to
install something, do something with administrative rights, or attempt
to access another computer over the network, I have to go through
frickin hoops. Bollocks. How sad is it that I can access computers on
an active directory domain easier with Ubuntu then with Vista. That is
not the worst though. How about trying to access my Vista desktop files
from another machine. Nearly impossible. Great, I’ve got security but
all practicality has flown out the window, which is exactly what I want
to do with my computer, throw it out the window. I’m now a network
admin on and active directory domain running Ubuntu. Nice work
Microsoft.

The only thing I’m going to miss are the games at home. But I
couldn’t run those on Vista either, so there is not much loss. This is
actually one of the reasons I broke. I tried to load the first Call of
Duty on my Vista box and when I ran it, it spat at me. Right in the
eye. WHAT? COD doesn’t work with Vista??? Forget it. Yes, I could have
gone on google and searched for a fix or mulled the boards of various
disgruntled user sites. But I’m tired of not being able to tweak Vista.
Do you know why I can’t tweak it? Because it is all proprietary.

On that note, I end this mess of a blog, asking, “Can I tweak Ubuntu?” The answer is hell yes. And I’m doing it right now.

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