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I think it is a waste of great work done by a lot of people to not use KDE as the interface for a server as well. Why throw away all the knowledge people have built up using the KDE desktop on a workstation and force them to use CLI for the server? This also puts the bar very high for anyone crossing over from a Windows or OSX server environment.

Web interfaces are great for some things, but why a different interface for a server? Better keep everything in the same line of design etc.

Here is what I think it would take to do this:

Take away the "user applications". Add GUI applications for as many server type applications as possible. Off the top of my head:

Samba
bind9
Cups
Apache
Php
MySQL

I am sure other people could add more applications to this list. But the bottom line is to use the familiarity that has already been built up on a workstation to make a new servermanager feel at home on a KDE server.

A good example is setting up a small caching DNS. This should only involve entering a few things. The rest is formatting, and we all know that this is something computerprograms are good at. When you add a DNS to a server, the following information is needed:

IP address of the server (no need to enter, it already exist)
Name of the server (no need to enter, it already exist)
Domain
Gateway
2 stk DNS to forward requests to if not found locally (Use OpenDNS as default)

The rest is formatting...

To get this a special edition of KDE would make sure this gets out to all distros and it would make a huge impact on the spread of Linux servers in smal businesses all over the world.

Well, the reason why most linux servers don't run an XServer is security, having less apps running means less potential security issues ... and performance of course.

OpenSuse includes a wide variety of graphical server setup tools ... you might want to give it a try.

Also what software to install and what not isn't the decission of the kde project, it's a distributions or users choice.

That being said, some server configuration tools in kdeadmin would be nice indeed.

These openSUSE frontends also use Qt so it is well integrated to KDE.
You can disable KDM/X11 when your configuration is done.

As a system administrator, I :thumbs_up: this proposal, but with a substantial change:
it would be nice to have an application for REMOTE configuration of machine/services.
What I have in mind is a plug-in based app, which retrieves configuration files by ssh (user must configure key-based login or provide a password) and displays nice radio buttons for enabling/disabling options.
It would be nice to have a standard way to write plugins (xml-based?) so they can be used even in a gnome/xfce/whatever app

It sounds great, and you dont need xserver running or even installed in order to have gui, you can connect remotely via ssh -X and have the gui in front of you without having X at the server . So these tools wont add a security concern, but will make your life easier.

jtsop wrote:It sounds great, and you dont need xserver running or even installed in order to have gui, you can connect remotely via ssh -X and have the gui in front of you without having X at the server . So these tools wont add a security concern, but will make your life easier.

I realise there are two main areas for a Linux server that we could talk about. One is the kind you put on the internet as a webserver. For this, I agree that it makes sense to have as few things running as possible.

But for a "wokgroup server" that is doing file and printer sharing as well as running an inhouse webserver it would make a lot of sense using the same interface as the workstations. Get people used to one interface and keep them on it.

I forgot on app on the list: ldap or some other catalog system.

I have found some apps that can do some of the job. And it might be the applications mentioned here. But what I also found was that they did not work on Ubuntu server.

It would be nice to have this as high up in "the chain" as possible. I think it would mean that more distros would adapt the tools and make sure it worked with their setup.

The tools need to keep the config files structure so that any admin could go in and edit the files directly after it has been set up by these GUI tools. There should even be a choice where you can set the config files back to "factory default" including all comments etc.

A lot of small businesses and organisations could use a good file/print server, but right now the only alternative they have is Windows Server 2008. I realise that not all people want the same apps on their server, but I think there are some apps that are more likely to go on there than others.

Another app to add to the small list: Proftpd.

The apps should also visually be really well integrated with KDE so they feel like a natural part of it.

Yes and I think this would be nice.
A simple application on a workstation that show the ldap tree and status of the services in the lan.

I thought you meant for KDE to automatically optimize for remote desktop connections like NX. That would be cool, too.

hm I think it exist all ready in this!

djtm wrote:I thought you meant for KDE to automatically optimize for remote desktop connections like NX. That would be cool, too.

I had the same idea few years back.

The Idea was if we could XML-ize all options of some application then makeing the GUI around should'nt be too much of a problem. And when you have one (good) standard other will follow. In the mean time I have also learned Ruby program language which would be perfect language for the task.

GUI doesn't matter then. KDE, http, text, gnome whatever.


by
TheR

THAT was really great news! I have been asking around for a way to write applications that are not dependent on a particular Window manager. So Ruby is the answer? Cool

So - how can it be done using the standard text-config files that already exist? Seems to be fairly structured, so it should be possible? Here is how is think of it:

1. Read the existing configuration into a database. This should always be done first to avoid problems if files have been edited via CLI.

2. Present a nice GUI with all options. There should be some standard choices that you can pick first and then adjust after. The program should be able to detect what distro and version of Linux is being used and apply the standards in theat distro as well as version of service that is being configured.

3. Write the new file out (overwrite the old).

4. Restart the service in question to get it to pick up on the new settings.

I guess the question I should ask then is "Where do I find some Ruby programmers that are willing to work on this?".

I'm not an expert, but then any scripting language would serve you — be it Ruby, Python, Lua, Perl or something even more obscure...

Could be. Don't know enough about it. That is why I am not able to do it myself. If I knew anything about this, I would just do it and not suggest it like this

This has to be done in such a way that it will be easy for the different distros to pick it up and deliver a server version. I know there exist some systems for server configuration as web interfaces, but I really prefer to use the same GUI for both workstations and servers. The slight performance hit that running a GUI introduces is a small price to pay to get a way of administering the server that even fairly new sysadmins can use. Why leave that segment of the market to MS and Apple? With a GUI like this, Linux can rule the small business server market. The goal? Have a print and file server installed and running in less than one hour including adding one printer to the server. This would be a great start. To add a local caching DNS based on bind9 should take less than 5 minutes.

Possible? I think so!

Hm why not gambas?
:shade:

Pardon me for being totally blank here - what is gambas?