MightyUserConfigurationTool

Summary

We need to »enmighten« our user configuration tool to make it fit for small companies, schools and family computers.

Rationale

With the user-admin tool we have some simple yet usable programme to manage small amounts of users. What we need is something more powerful to fit the needs of family pc, small business installations and terminal server installations in for example schools. Therefore some tools must get melted to one. Something like user-admin with support for Sabayon profiles (extra tab in the user's preferences to select a desktop profile for that user), Quotas to limit the hdd usage and some better access control to the system administrative tools and applications inside or outside the menu of the user. This all could be extra tabs for the user-admin tool. Supporting ACLs in Nautilus and as default for Ubuntu Installations would kick ass.

Use cases

A teacher heard of Edubuntu and set up a nice terminal server for the pupils of his school. He found setting up the server the in the terminal suckt, but he's luckily using his server. By now all students login to the same account. He thinks that doesn't make much sense and he's right. In an Ubuntu Forum he heard about some nifty features to create user names for every student and so on. After he created accounts with password for all the students he thinks further: »It is a problem that the children can do with their desktop what they want. I need something to make all desktops similiar, or they want stop cheating us teachers with stupid auto hiding panels.«. He know wants to do so, but applying one desktop profile to 350 accounts needs 350 clicks, he would have liked something better, where he can 1. apply desktop profiles to user groups and 2. can do so through the »normal« users configuration utility. Another problem is flying around the teachers head, what if some clever children starts to fill the hdd with stupid nonsense? He heard of quota, but it seems to complicated to him. Again he whishes one simple tool to do so.

Dad bought a new computer for the family. He wants to have one account with administrative rights for himself and one normal account for his wife, who doesn't want to be an »operator« because she is afraid she destroys something. Further he wants three parochial account for his three children. As he doesn't want them to surf in the internet he prohibits it with the user-admin tool by unchecking the »Use Internet« box, which automatically sets up an ACL for the executable of Firefox and the other internet applications and hides them in the menus. Furthermore he does not want his daughter to always copy movies and stupid crap to his hard drive so he restricts her hdd usage to 500 MB. He also thinks having a directory where all users can store stuff would be great. With Nautilus a directory and a few ACLs are rakish created.

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

Needs a lot of hard work melting all the stuff in one programme. New programmes need to be written (quota). Would hardly get integrated to upstream gnome-system-tools.

CategorySpec

MightyUserConfigurationTool (last edited 2008-08-06 16:29:18 by localhost)