Hi there, That's really interesting (I'm going to squirrel that info away!).
How do you deal with Active Directory licensing? Are you buying a Server Client Access Licenses for each Ubuntu machine? Cheers, Chris On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 12:26 PM, Bolesław Tokarski < boleslaw.tokar...@tieto.com> wrote: > Hello, > > How do you solve the machine policies topic? > > I mean - how do you make sure that a Ubuntu machine in your environment > runs according to some policies you specify? Microsoft defined this as a > "Group Policy", perhaps the more general term is "System Configuration > Management". > > As we found no product that does this out of the box (not sure about > Centrify, though, but we couldn't afford it), we glued together a number of > components to do the job. > > Firstly, we took CFEngine (www.cfengine.com) as the policy "enforcement" > tool. This is a configuration automation tool. A valid choice would be > Puppet as well, though we found CFEngine to be more lightweight and suits > better for laptops. We defined a set of policies or configuration elements, > like domain joining, authentication, firewall, VPN, etc. > > Secondly, we used cfgen > (http://dozzie.jarowit.net/**trac/wiki/cfgen<http://dozzie.jarowit.net/trac/wiki/cfgen>), > a configuration template solution for flexibility. > > Thirdly, we used plaintext, YAML-structured files to hold variables used > for templating. This part seems trivial, but we allowed inheritance between > the files, so we created sets of variables depending on country the machine > originated from, the location the machine is in now (mostly for locating > proxy servers and nearest mirror), the Active Directory domain the machine > belongs to etc. We also provided a local override on the machines so the > user can disable most policy enforcements (we preferred that over the user > disabling the whole policy). > > Lastly, we decided to get all the possible information about a machine we > could from Active Directory. We acquired: > 1. The place in the directory structure (OU) where the machine object > resides, that gave us the machine original location. > 2. The IP subnet to AD "Sites and services" mapping, so we were able to > tell by the machine's location where the machine is now. > 3. The owner of the machine (managedBy property). > 4. The groups a machine belongs to. > > Unfortunately, we could not get the native Group Policy properties of an > object nor the ACLs of Active Directory objects. So, instead, we decided on > a group naming convention. If a machine belongs to group called > "policy_certificate", it receives the variables and policies for the > "certificate" set. > > I would be glad to learn how other people approached the topic, solved it? > Perhaps there are tools out there that we missed? > > Cheers, > Ballock > > -- > Mailing list: > https://launchpad.net/~**enterprise-ubuntu<https://launchpad.net/~enterprise-ubuntu> > Post to : > enterprise-ubuntu@lists.**launchpad.net<enterprise-ubuntu@lists.launchpad.net> > Unsubscribe : > https://launchpad.net/~**enterprise-ubuntu<https://launchpad.net/~enterprise-ubuntu> > More help : > https://help.launchpad.net/**ListHelp<https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp> >
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