NetDirector How tos and Tips and Tricks

[gtewallace]

I'd love to see a discussion thread set up on tip/tricks for using and extending NetDirector (www.netdirector.org) There's also a few modules in Beta (LDAP, Kerberos and a plugin to RHN) that it would be great to get user feedback on.

For those not familiar with it, since NetDirector was made available on SourceForge on April 4, 2006, about 5,000 people have downloaded it to manage the configurations of their local and distributed Linux (Fedora, RHEL, CENTOS, SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu) and Solaris (8,9,10 and Open) servers. Current service modules available are Apache, BIND, Samba, Sendmail, Postfix, VSFTP, NFS, Users and Groups, Kerberos (beta), LDAP (Beta), and a plugin to RHN (beta). There's also a SSH module that let's you manage any other service running on your Linux/Solaris machines with the security of role-based authentication. The system is designed to be a very plugable framework, and there's a developer's guide to how to write your own plugins to NetDirector to manage anything you want.

A couple things that distinguish NetDirector are its one-to-many capability, so you can make a change to multiple servers at once, its change scheduling capability, change rollback, role-based permissions, embedded Postgres or MySQL database to track all changes by user, server and service, and there's a handy config. cloning function that let's you copy all the service configurations from one machine to another. All of this is done through an easy-to-use GUI, but NetDirector also lets experienced admins go straight to the .conf files from within the system, which still gives them the niceties of change scheduling and rollback. Screenshot attached...

There's quite a bit more to it, which you can find out about at the community portal www.netdirector.org

[falko]

Originally Posted by gtewallace

I'd love to see a discussion thread set up on tip/tricks for using and extending NetDirector (www.netdirector.org)

I don't think there's enough interest here that would justify creating a whole new forum just for NetDirector. I think for now it's enough to use the existing forums to discuss it.