Xandros Desktop Management Server Illustrates a Maturing Linux Market

By: Bill von Hagen
Thursday, January 6, 2005 10:32:45 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/5699/1/

The Need for Enterprise Desktop Administration

One of the classic indicators of the maturity of any software platform is the existence of enterprise-caliber administrative software. Companies such as Tivoli, now an IBM subsidiary, Computer Associates, and many others have made this space their bread and butter. Xandros, purveyors of fine Xandros Linux distributions for home and business use, recently introduced their Xandros Desktop Management Server (xDMS) software to fill exactly this need for Xandros Linux users and administrators.

It's easy enough to install a Linux distribution on a zillion desktops, one at a time, but it's incredibly time-consuming and obviously not an enterprise solution. Folks like Red Hat have largely punted on the desktop space, while companies such as Novell have stepped up to demonstrate an increased focus there thanks to their acquisition of SUSE.

However, the real key to successful penetration of the desktop space is the availability of administrative tools that make it easy to deploy, update, and manage Linux installations across multiple desktops. Tools like YaST2 (SUSE), the surprisingly unlamented linuxconf (Red Hat's old centralized administrative utility), and others are fine for tweaking local settings, but administrators in an enterprise environment need an easy way to set up and manage hundreds of largely identical systems.

Administrators need to be able to provide standard but customized installations to satisfy the requirements of various groups, while standardizing infrastructure requirements such as printer configuration, user accounts and authentication, network filesystems, and all of the other components of a true enterprise-wide computing environment. A distributed installation, deployment, and configuration management tool is the only sane way to do that, and it is precisely this need that xDMS addresses for sites that have adopted Xandros Linux as their Linux distribution of choice.

While still a young product and not without a speed bump or two, xDMS is a nicely-designed and well-thought out product that currently makes it easy to deploy and manage Xandros Desktop OS Business Edition, version 2.6. Given that version 3.0 of Xandros Linux was recently released and an updated business edition is slated for January, an updated version of xDMS is sure to follow that will make it similarly easy to deploy and manage version 3.0 on any desktop that is reachable by an Ethernet connection.

xDMS Installation and Overview

The xDMS installer is based on the same easy-to-use installer used with Xandros Desktop OS Linux distributions. Figure 1 shows one of the standard screens from the installation sequence, the Administrative Options screen in which you set the root password and define a few basic security policies.

The only novel part of the xDMS installation is the fact that it requests not only the password for the root user (standard stuff), but also the account name and password for the primary xDMS authenticated user. As explained in more detail later in this review, xDMS provides it own authentication and delegation mechanism for the users who can use it to create and deploy distributions and updates.

As an administrative environment rather than an end-user workstation, xDMS focuses on well-established kernel revisions and infrastructure. Based on Debian 4.0 (Sarge), xDMS uses a 2.4.27 Linux kernel with some Xandros enhancements and bug fixes, and features Xandros' enhanced version of the KDE 3.1.4 desktop, supported by XFree86 version 4.3. KDE fans may be aghast at the absence of the thousands of k* utilities that typically accompany a KDE installation, but their absence highlights xDMS's focus on serving as a basic administrative environment. It also removes the temptation of playing Doom on your administrative console while your Zimbabwe office is trying to update their systems from your server.

Aside from the core Xandros Linux distribution that supports it, Xandros Desktop Management Server product consists of three main components. The xDMS Repository Builder enables you to import Xandros Linux distributions and Debian DEB packages that you can group into what are known as Installation Units. The xDMS Console application enables you to export existing installation units for deployment, schedule the availability of system updates for remote systems, and so on. Finally, the xDMS Administrator enables you to delegate the authority to other users and groups beyond the default xdmsadmin user that was created when you installed xDMS.

Easy-access icons for all of the core components of xDMS are installed on the xDMS desktop. The next few sections provide an overview of using each of these and how they work together.

Using the Repository Builder

The core concept of xDMS is to create repositories which contain the specific Xandros Linux distributions that you want to administer from an xDMS server. The first step in using xDMS is therefore to build a repository that contains information about the Linux distribution that you are deploying. These are created using the xDMS Repository Builder (/usr/bin/xdmsrb), for which an icon is provided on the default xDMS desktop. Double-clicking this icon starts the Repository Builder in a superuser context using the kdesu application.

xDMS automatically creates a repository for itself when installed as the default operating system on your xDMS server. To create a repository for an actual end-user Xandros distribution, insert that distribution's installation CD and select the File, Import command. The Import Wizard displays, as shown in Figure 2, enabling you to specify whether you are importing an entire distribution or only specific DEB packages into your xDMS repository. Figure 3 shows the xDMS Repository Builder importing information about Xandros Desktop OS 2.6 distribution, Business Edition.

At the present time, xDMS can only create complete repositories for Xandros Desktop OS Business Edition 2.6. However, the DEB package import feature makes it easy for a system administrator to create custom versions of a distribution by adding collections of packages for standard Open Source applications that you want to distribute to all systems on your site.

Every Xandros Desktop OS product includes pre-compiled sets of compatible applications on an Applications CD that can quickly and easily be added to a default distribution using this feature. Being able to add customized DEB packages also makes it easy to add and deploy locally-built DEB packages for site-specific applications.

To add custom packages, you select the File, Import command, select the DEB packages radio button from the dialog shown in Figure 2, browse to the location of those packages, and select the ones that you want to import. After importing one or more DEB packages, the Repository Builder enables you to assign them to a parcel, which is Xandros' term for a logical collection of packages. The idea of parcels enables you to create sets of related and required packages for things like compilers and sophisticated editors for development systems.

If you want to create a customized distribution such as a developer-oriented distribution that includes compilers, debuggers, emacs, and other essential tools, you can use the Repository Builder's Installation Units tab after importing your distributions and optional packages. Select the appropriate Product from the drop-down list at top, and xDMS displays the pre-defined "versions" of that distribution that you can install. (These are "Complete desktop," "Standard desktop," and "Minimal desktop" for Xandros Linux distributions.) You can then use right-click menus to copy an existing Installation Unit and modify its properties, adding and removing packages and parcels in order to define your customized distribution.

Besides simply importing distributions and packages, the Repository Builder also enables you to create a snapshot of a system that was installed using xDMS. This is extremely handy if you want to pre-define users, printer configurations, and so on.

The final step in creating a repository is to create the media that you will use to install Xandros Linux from your xDMS server. To do this, select File, Create Boot Image. You can create floppy-based, CD-based, or network boot (PXE) images. Floppy and PXE images are delivered via DHCP and LDAP.

Enabling and Scheduling Remote Installations

The xDMS Console application enables you to define the Installable Units and updates that your xDMS server provides within your enterprise environment. To do this, you start xDMS Console, select the Schedule tab, and click the new icon. This displays the wizard shown in Figure 4.

The characteristics of a scheduled job are its name, what you're doing (OS deployment, updates, etc.), what you're installing to do that, the MAC or IP addresses of hosts on which this can be installed, and the period of time that the job is valid for. If you're scheduling an operating system deployment, the wizard also prompts you for the root password on the remote systems, and how the installation should interact with the disks on those systems.

The ability to specify a range of IP addresses on which a distribution can be installed or updated and the time frame for those installs makes it easy for a system administrator to remote install certain distributions on specific subnets, schedule updates to occur at off-peak times, and so on.

After scheduling a job, you can go to any system with a valid MAC address or within the range of valid IP addresses, insert the boot media you created in the Repository Builder, and boot the machine from that media in order for xDMS to do its installation. Figure 5 shows a sample boot screen when booting from an xDMS boot image. Figure 6 shows a sample screen shot taken while a remote installation is taking place.

Information about the status of each remote installation is displayed in the window at the bottom of the xDMS console. This makes it easy to see what systems have been installed successfully, and any systems on which installation errors occurred.

Once a remote installation has completed successfully, you simply remove the boot media and reboot the system. All systems installed using xDMS include a desktop icon for the xDMS console, which makes it easy for authenticated administrators to retrieve updates and other packages from an xDMS server in the future.

Authentication and Delegation in xDMS

The xDMS Administrator enables you to define users who have the necessary privileges to access the xDMS Console to create and schedule jobs, and to delegate the ability to create authenticated users. Figure 7 shows the xDMS Administrator.

Being able to define users who can use the xDMS Administrator and the xDMS Console is a nice way to give local administrators certain privileges without just handing out the xDMS superuser password. As mentioned previously, these local administrators can subsequently use the xDMS Console icon on these remote systems to retrieve updates and other packages from an xDMS server in the future.

Conclusion

Xandros Desktop Management Server is a well-designed, useful tool that can save system administrators substantial amounts of time. Though still somewhat immature, it does a fine job if you are currently deploying the Xandros 2.6 Deluxe or Business editions across your enterprise. Do not attempt to use version 1.0 or 1.01 to deploy Xandros 3.0 without checking with your Xandros salesperson or using Xandros Networks tool to check for and install updates. In my testing, Xandros 3.0 broke xDMS and you may even find that you have to reinstall to get 2.6 installations working again.

xDMS will certainly be updated soon in order to support Xandros' latest 3.0 Linux distributions. Xandros has a unique opportunity to expand into the general administrative market if they would make xDMS aware of Linux distributions beyond their own. Given that Xandros is current giving xDMS away if you buy 5 or more licenses for Xandros 2.6, I suspect that xDMS will be even more flexible and impressive in the future.

Bill von Hagen is the author of numerous books and articles on Linux. For more information about Bill, see http://www.vonhagen.org.