[geeks] I love it when software gets more efficient

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sat, 09 Sep 2006 @ 12:05 -0500, Phil Brutsche said:

> Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > You can also integrate Firefox quite a bit by creating Gnome specific
> > builds of it.
> > 
> > Not sure what you meant here.
> 
> For starters, Firefox doesn't respect system-wide proxy settings under
> GNOME or KDE.

The Mozilla build doesn't, no.

But if you build the full desktop version it does, or at least it used
to when I was playing with Gnome.

> > Personally, I don't like browser integration very much.  It causes
> > enough problems that I avoid too much of it.
> > 
> >> and that the (non-Windows) desktop doesn't have a way to support
> >> hard-coded network-wide settings...
> > 
> > You mean like proxy settings?  That can be done.
> >> Getting those parameters set for 1000 people spread across 300
> >> workstations would suck.
> > 
> > What parameters would you need to set?
> 
> Hard coding proxy settings, or anything listed in about:config,
> network-wide.

Well, you would not want to control all of about:config. That's
thousands of settings and controlling all of it would be hard on any
system.

The way Firefox (and a lot of other applications) work is by reading
global configuration and then merging in the user configuration.

So you could do a lot of what you want just by distributing a customized
global configuration file.

For Windows, it would be custom registry entries, which you can handle
with Windows admin tools.

For UNIX and Windows applications that have their own configuration
files, you would use a standard distribution method of your choice.

Firefox for example, you would just put your custom chrome files
and databases in the master install directory.

If you want users to not be able to change settings, you'd protect their
individual configuration files.  This is true on Windows too.

Personally, I don't think any admin can possibly know all the changes a
user will need to make, so beyond a few basics, I'm not sure there is
much use in controlling the rest, even if it is possible.

> Restricting what settings can and cannot be seen or changed by the end
> user - cache size, proxy settings, everything you see in about:config.

Well, that requires some form of ACLs, which really don't scale very
well.

You'd want applications to follow some universal conventions like an
"allowed actions" file.  

That's about the only way to keep ACL performance at acceptable levels,
especially in something as complex as application settings.

> Globally adding a link to the bookmarks or link bar.

You can set up KDE and Gnome to have global bookmark folders in addition
to the user folder.

> Those are things that can be done with Group Policies in a Windows
> environment.

Hmmm... I've never seen that.

I've seen Windows shops manage a few of the basics, but not the level of
control you've described.

Not all Windows applications use things like network settings and other
managed resources, so how do you handle them?

I remember doing this with Samba because we could use UNIX scripts to
manage the Windows configuration files, including locking up registry
files and text configuration files, but it was a lot of work to find
everything we needed to care for, and a lot of applications outright
failed when we tried to control them.



-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- [governorrhea: a contagious disease that
spreads from the governor of a state downward through other offices and his
corporate sponsors]