[Maintain-dev] Re: [Maintain] Problems with building config files through the backend (fwd)

[Kirsten Petersen]

Woo.

________________
Kirsten Petersen
Network Services * Oregon State University
http://oregonstate.edu/net * irc.oregonstate.edu #osu-is
"If you're not learning, you're not living."

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 03 Jun 2007 17:04:55 +0400
From: Mathias Weigt <m.weigt at uni-bonn.de>
To: Kirsten Petersen <kirsten.petersen at oregonstate.edu>
Subject: Re: [Maintain] Problems with building config files through the backend

Kirsten Petersen schrieb:
> Mathias,
>
> We are currently in the process of requesting a grant to support
> continued development of the Maintain project.  If you could answer a
> few questions, it would be very helpful to us.
>
>
> 1. How do you plan to use Maintain 3?

I have to manage a computer pool of 35 PCs and some printers in its own subnet (but they are rather static)
Additionally I have to manage 95 IP adresses for my workgroup (PCs, Printers, Notebooks a.s.o.). I have to share the
subnet with other workgroups in our house and I'm currently running one DHCP-server (no secondary) with MAC-matching.
Then I have some private subnets for a little compute cluster and some linux workstations.

To manage this DHCP-Server is currently time intensive because I have my dhcpd.conf and parallel an openoffice
spreadsheet to do this. Therefore I was looking for a database based system and found Maintain which looked very
promising. But it took some months before I really tried to install it. Although I'm quiet experienced with linux
systems I have done very little with MySQL and PHP and the documentation of maintain looked like it wouldn't be very easy...

But now that I setup Maintain successfully and got it to write config files I think I can manage our PCs printers and
laptops more easily. And I can delegate some administration tasks to some of our PhD students.
The next thing to try is to setup a DNS server too. This would be extremely useful for our Linux workstations because
currently I'm using a NIS server and have to edit this database also to match up with our PCs.

> 2. Have you used Maintain before?  If so:
no

>  2.a. Where and for how many hosts/users?
>  2.b. What problems did Maintain solve for you or your organization?

none yet but  will solve a lot...

-- 
Mathias Weigt

Institute of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of Bonn

An der Immenburg 4
53121 Bonn
Germany

Phone: +49/228/73-5240