Overview of the OSS iFolder Enterprise Server
From iFolder
The released open source code isn't exactly the same as shipped with Novell's Open Enterprise Server (OES) but from this point forward will be exactly the same bits that we ship with our Novell products.
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Differences between OSS (3.5) and 3.2 Servers
iManager Console
In OES the iFolder server is managed using a closed source management console aptly named iManager. Obviously this wasn't going to fly for the open source server so we have started rewriting the admin console as an open ASP.NET application. If you install the server package in the unstable Download section of the Wiki you will be able to take a test drive of the “work in progress” console.
http://host/admin for the administrator console.
YaST configurator
The iFolder install for OES is a YAST based install but has knowledge and ties with other closed source OES products so we'll need to re-factor the install and sever all ties with closed source products. The bits we dropped has no post install setup. Huh, how can that be? Well we wanted to get the code out as quickly as possible and make it as simple as possible to get an iFolder server up and running. We built packages for two platforms: SuSE 10 and SLES 10 Beta 8. You must have Apache installed and also have the Mono tools installed. Once you install the iFolder server package, restart Apache, and the iFolder server will be up in running. The domain name and description may also be changed to your preference as well. If left default, the server's domain name is “iFolder Server”, clever eh!
Reliance upon eDirectory (LDAP) for user management
Last, the iFolder server in OES included an LDAP connector which allowed an IT administrator to specify eDirectory users based on containment, group and object to provision those users in the iFolder system. In this setup, the iFolder server federates authentication to eDirectory but performs rights authorization within iFolder itself. The team had begun work to re-factor the external identity framework to make it easier to plug other providers into the system and to make it easier to generically manage and control the synchronization. Consequently, we have not re-factored the LDAP provider to plug back into the framework. In this drop we have included an internal identity store otherwise known as the Roster, which stores users and their credentials in Simias itself.
In the future, user management will be included in our admin utility as well as a configured add on self registration service which allows users to self provision themselves. For now we have included a command line mono based application for simple user management. With the default RPM install, a couple of scripts that reference the utility are laid down in /usr/bin. Those scripts are simias-create-user, simias-delete-user and simias-user. simias-user –help will give you an idea of their current capabilities. More self service functionality will be coming shortly. The script names will be changing as well to closely match the user management utilities in linux so simias-create-user will become ifuseradd and simias-user to ifuser.
Removal of TSA agent
There was no way to open-source the iFolder TSA that shipped with iFolder 3.1 and 3.2 in OES. In the future we will have a backup API to meet the needs of accidental deletion of files and Server recovery.
New WebAccess
For the new WebAccess go to:
http://host/ifolder will bring up the web access console.
Future enhancements
If you're really brave check out the source and build your own server for Windows or Mac. There will be many changes and enhancements coming in the next few months for this code base. We will be adding multi-server and multi domain capability; connectors to eDirectory, Active Directory and OpenLDAP; Public iFolders and of course finishing the web access and admin consoles. With this drop you can checkout out our web service interfaces into the iFolder server.
For a peek
http://host/simias10/iFolderAdmin.asmx for admin and
http://host/simias10/IFolderWeb.asmx for end user service.
Both web access and the admin console use these interfaces exclusively to perform their tasks so jump in and contribute something new; possibly something we haven't thought of.
Discussion of ToDo list
We will be posting an active TODO list for the server shortly but two huge enhancements we'd love to see.
WebDav
A WebDAV front end to iFolder would rock! Colleges and Universities are begging for this feature. If you scan the code you'll notice a skeleton DAV server exists. /trunk/simias/src/server/Simias.Dav.
OpenDoc Converter for webaccess
A document conversion service that converts, for starters, all OpenDoc files to an HTML version which could be viewed through web access. Now that would be sweet!
Miscellaneous Issues
- OSS version does not currently support SSL but expect it soon.
- The 3.5 server requires a 3.4 client to connect to it. The released 3.2 versions will not work correctly against the new server. This is not expected to change. This is due to the complexity of adding multi-server support as well as journaling.
