You may have read already about Ubuntu centralized server administrator since it has been mentioned on the lasts server meetings and as you may have noticed i’m not present on them, so i will start giving the status of the spec from here, but first, as this is the first time i blog about it i will start describing what is ucsa:
On the last UDS i talked to some people about making a tool to control and manage services easily and without pain for new sysadmins. The first thing really painful about service management tools is that you have limited options on it, and if you edit your config file by hand it will simply break the tool, so you can or use the tool or edit config files, not the 2 of them at the same time, so one of the goals was to have some way to edit the config files by hand and not destroy the management tool, but how? You can’t! You must be out of your mind! Well, it might be, but we got some ideas on how to do this:
Ignored zone:
We first talk about making the tool read until some stop point, so the sysadmin can edit after that point without breaking anything because the tool wasn’t going to read it.
Augeas
After UDS someone send some links to the server team list and one of them catch my attention, it was a tool that parses config files and present them as trees so you don’t need to care about the config file itself, just edit the tree and save it, it was the perfect backend for ucsa!
Also, i wanted a tool that doesn’t depend on any service (as a web browser), since i want to care only about the services, so we need a user interface different from CLI, since it’s “hard” from the new linux sysadmins (now i love it, but remember when you start!). Gtk? plz! who wants Xorg on his server, maybe for home servers, but not as initial UI, Curses! That’s perfect! We can use it from command line without needing anything extra! Yay!
So what’s the progress? I’ve already packaged augeas, i’m just waiting for someone to review it and give me feedback or upload it.
Find this a cool idea? Stay tunned, there is more!
but i will still work on that, the goal is ubuntu 10.04 so i have some time, if you have some ideas, please send them to me to nvalcarcel AT ubuntu DOT org