enterprise-ubuntu team mailing list archive

[Chris Rowson <christopherrowson@xxxxxxxxx>]

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.tokarski@xxxxxxxxx> 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
>
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