Outline for a Distributed Admin Tool
This page describes how the distributed admin tool could work and what it should do.
This could be used for centralized administration of one or more machines for one or more services, both for debian or other distributions. Especially key-turn-solutions like DebianEdu and large scale deployments could profit from this.
What is it?
It will be an advanced replacement for Webmin, which provides admin capabilities for numerous services on a local server. This tool would be able to do more: it would be able to do network wide changes in a coordinated fashion, provide different user interfaces (commandline, webinterface, X and perhaps even Windows?) and find controlable services on it's own with zeroconfig. These would insert themselfs into the whole network like plugins. Security within the domain would need to be provided by Kerberos.
Because a standarized, popular interface like SOAP between the central part and the distributed plugins, the many different distributed parts could be written in programming languages of choice by whoever is interested in having such a plugin.
How does it work?
Every service that should be administrated gets a small daemon installed on the same machine on which the specific service runs on. It ommunicates via SOAP with the centralized admin daemon. That provides both a user interface to the different distributed services on the network and routes the
Example Use Cases
An Admin creates a user account on all machines in a cluster
prerequisits: The cluster uses LDAP as a directory service and distributes home directories via a network file system.
On the LDAP server there is an "account handler" plugin and on the fileserver a "storage handler" plugin. Both plugins have already communicated their capabilities to the centralized admin daemon. The needed capibilities to create a user account are "provide account entry to network", "create new account entry" (from the account handler plugin on the LDAP server) and a "create new home directory" and "provide home directory to network" (from the strage handler plugin).