ClearFoundation

Brian Raynor wrote:
In the User Manager - previously Directory->Users:

* Options view - 5.2 provided a NICE list of users complete with "Options" showing icons for the various different access rights the user had (ie: shell access, content filter, web, fileshare, etc). In my environment, since I have various people adding users for me, I told them that an easy way to check to see if any of the users were setup incorrectly was to look to see that all the icons lined up. In general, except for admin users, all these would be exactly the same (email, filter, web, and shell (in order to authen via LDAP in Edubuntu with LTSP) - not actually letting them drop to an actual shell).

Agreed, we need to bring that back in some capacity (here' s the new tracker on the topic). There are two reasons it fell of the map in ClearOS 6:

- Speed. The information that you see now is available via super fast system calls. You can load up 1,000 (or even 10,000) users in ClearOS and it's snappy. Grabbing that extra user information without a serious slowdown would pose a challenge.

- Active Directory compatible. The summary page when running in Active Directory mode looks exactly the same so it's a consistent user experience.

* Secondly, there appears to be a lot of information missing that used to be asked for, specifically the Address section. While we didn't always use this, it did help in many ways for certain users.

That's just optional now and not installed by default. Head over to Marketplace and install the "Contact Extension" if you need it. If you install an app that would use it (Google Apps, Zarafa) then it gets installed as a dependency.

* And lastly, the "User Defined Groups" not being in the user means that I'll have to teach the people helping admin (who like I said come and go) to go back and manually add new users to the groups. Lots of more room for errors. WOuld love to be able to do this when creating/editing a user as it made it MUCH easier (especially as when users progress through the program at the recovery center, we change their groups to allow more access).

That should have already been done! The underlying code is already there, it just needs an hour or so of developer attention for the GUI. Here's the tracker

Thats Peter! Great news on all counts.

I totally understand the performance notion regarding showing the user summaries on the same screen, especially for the large numbers of users. I'd propose the following:

* Continue to show the user display as you do now, but have a button that when pressed would bring up an overall user view that then would show all this information (and still allow you to edit the user from there). Perhaps in this view, you'd only show say 50-100 users (perhaps configurable) at a time, allowing you to go to next or previous. Also provide a quick link to allow you to quickly just ahead to another page (than just showing page 1, 2, 3, etc links, would suggest doing this by three letter groups based on the first few letters of the user names (ie: AAR-DOB, DRA-HER, etc).

As well, the ability to produce a text report of the user summary here (with EVERYONE) that could be printed would be VERY useful. Have a few other thoughts on user reports, but that probably wouldn't make sense to have in this section but in the Reports itself.


Thanks for the info on "Contact Extension", I had not seen that, but will look for it and try this. We were just using this field (incorrectly I might add) to store certain specific information on each user (dates they entered each phase of the program), though there's really better places to store this, it was just temporary, but good to see if we choose to, we can still do this (since people in the program are residents of the facility who might otherwise have no other home, the address fields aren't really used in that manner.).


On the add group when creating a user. Great! Glad to see that is in the works. In fact, I went and looked at the source for the user page and did see comments to the affect that this needed to be added.

Glad to hear! Once I get my business travel done over the next two weeks, I'll make the decision of whether the new deployment will go on 5.2, or 6.2. Based on your replies, I'm heavily leaning toward 6.2 (so I won't later have to migrate) since most of the things I require are in the works. Unless of course I see a show stopper.

And one final question... Are there any plans to create GUI pages for using Clear OS as a gateway and LAN to LAN router, as well as for VLAN configuration? I'm doing this in my home system with 5.2 (I have a heavily VLAN'd environment at home, believe it or not), but of course I had to edit a few things at the shell prompt, etc. Easy enough, but a web GUI would be nice. If not, perhaps something to work on in my spare time (if there ever is such a thing) to learn the new APIs.


Thanks!

Hi Brian,

And one final question... Are there any plans to create GUI pages for using Clear OS as a gateway and LAN to LAN router, as well as for VLAN configuration? I'm doing this in my home system with 5.2 (I have a heavily VLAN'd environment at home, believe it or not), but of course I had to edit a few things at the shell prompt, etc. Easy enough, but a web GUI would be nice. If not, perhaps something to work on in my spare time (if there ever is such a thing) to learn the new APIs.

Yes, VLAN, bonding and wireless will start to trickle into ClearOS. There's a big push to get some of the ClearBOX implementation tricks backported into mainstream ClearOS. We took too long getting 6 out the door and David - the smart guy driving ClearBOX innovation - forged ahead with custom ClearOS/ClearBOX builds. We're merging the code base and should have a good first cut ready for release in June. I think VLANs and bonding will only be in "read only" mode by June (i.e. webconfig will recognize those properly). Wireless access point should be 100% complete though.