[CentOS] user management solution needed

Thu Nov 5 04:21:35 UTC 2009
Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com>

On Thu, 2009-11-05 at 11:58 +0800, Christopher Chan wrote:
> Alan McKay wrote:
> > Hey folks,
> >
> > What is the best way to manage users across multiple CentOS boxes?
> >
> > Ideally what I'd like to be able to do is have central control over
> > who has access to which box from a minute-to-minute basis.   e.g. User
> > X needs access to Box A for 30 minutes - clickity, clickity and they
> > have access for that long after which their access is automatically
> > turned off.
> >
> > thanks,
> > -Alan
> >
> >   
> Has anyone tried GOSA?
> 
> http://gosa-project.org/
----
actually yes, just the other day.

It's highly opinionated and not for half-hearted attempts. It probably
is a good project but goes way beyond what I was looking for so I gave
up.

It requires PHP 5.2 or higher so I ended up installing the php packages
from dev.centos.org so I could make it work.

I'm sort of happy with Webmin's LDAP User and Groups and I look at other
LDAP user/group management software with interest. I will just say GOsa
is not for me but probably is a useful software package for some. 

My problem is not really User and Group management but rather trying to
find a 'user' package that can import maybe CSV files for a bulk import
for Address Books. I have been using Horde/Turba (www.horde.org) for
this but it's not easy for casual users so I end up having to do that
for users/companies. After that, Turba is good enough for them to
maintain address book entries because the typical Address Book client
(Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Address Book, etc.) is read only and cannot
be used to maintain an LDAP Address Book. Strangely enough, the only
useful address book client application that I have found that is
reasonably useful for this is KAddressBook (KABC).

Craig


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