Fleet Commander has seen quite a lot of progress recently, of which I should blog about soon. For those unaware, Fleet Commander is an effort to make GNOME great for IT administrators in large deployments, allowing them to deploy desktop and application configuration profiles across hundreds of machines with ease through a web administration UI based on Cockpit. It is mostly implemented in Python.
One important aspect of large deployments is their identity management systems to handle large numbers of users, groups and hosts. On the free software end, FreeIPA is the project that we’ve integrated Fleet Commander with. FreeIPA is an administrative interface and sets of APIs that integrates LDAP directory, DNS and other related services together. Another way to describe FreeIPA is as the Linux’s counterpart of Microsoft’s Active Directory.
And that’s precisely what the GSoC idea we want a student for is about, we think that the best way to encourage GNOME usage in large organizations is to have tools that ease the migration, many organizations may have an existing Microsoft Windows deployment managed by Active Directory, so we want Fleet Commander to be able to use Active Directory as well as FreeIPA as the identity management system and data store for the profile data (by using Group Policy Objects).
This project would be mostly implemented in Python and it will require talking to AD’s LDAP server and CIFS/Samba storage, we are fairly confident that it can be achieved during the GSoC term.
If you are looking for a fun GSoC project, you’re skilled in Python and are interested in becoming a GNOME contributor by helping it reach a larger user base and take it one step closer to world domination and make some money in the process you should apply!
We’re hanging around in the #fleet-commander IRC channel in irc.freenode.net if you want to approach us to get a better understanding of the idea, look for ogutierrez, fidencio and aruiz if you have any questions.
Silicon Island 