Topic: Web Manager should haves

[Jason]

I have been using e-smith since version 4.0 and absolutely love it.  One thing I have noticed over the last year or so is many solutions that have been implemented without Web Manager pages, "for us GUI guys".  If you look at the Web Manager from 4.0 compared to now in 5.0 there have been very little additions.

  Here are my suggestions.

Port forwarding page.  yes there are how-to's out there but this would be highly marketable.  

NT specific page.  adding NT 4.0 or 2k workstations to the domain. setting up roaming profiles, login scripts, trustrelationships, printer management for NT clients.

  Im sure this could be taken wrongly,  I just think you guys have an awesome product and this would "market" your product more effectively.  I know several of these have been done.  I would like to see an "e-smith" approved NT Web manager screen, I really believe this would be "ground breaking"

  I appreciate all the hard work the developers are doing.  I am always on the lookout for small firms that could use your product.

[Mike]

Hi Jason

I also am fairly new to the E-Smith server too.
My first download was the 4.1.2 version and now I use de SME V5.
I work in a company with about 2000 WindowsNT 4.0 Clients and many Servers, Windows NT, AS400 Mainframe and so on, but I also do not know enough to work with the Linux base system.
I have been looking at Linux several times now, already have multiple versions of Linux Suse, but it isn't easy to switch from Windows thinking to Linux thinking.
That's why the E-smith server was very a nice surprice.
The E-Smith server is really very easy to install and set up just with some basic knowledge of TCP/IP and the use of users and groups.

When you want users to be able to work away easily with a system (frontend) than you choose Windows but everyone that has looked a bit furher than Windows knows that for server solutions Linux is more stabile, has much more capability's (although that is what makes it so much more complicated), is better suited for serversolutions and is free to download.

I read through several mails of the forum and was sweetly amused by the almost political mail-fights.
Developers of the E-Smith Server, if you read this, software is never ready but I think you did a good job so far.
I have read some good points though.
I don't know anymore where I read it but they are right if they say that the price is more targeted on the bigger company's and not the little ones.
Jason, I like your way of thinking, you think the way I do, more GUI-thinking-like.
The webbased server manager is what the developers should work on too.
In that they should not only think of the bigger things but also the little things like how much harddiskspace is available on the server. That should have to be a klik and view future. For the developers probably an easy thing to ad to the webbased server manager.
Retrieve single files or single directory structures from the backup is also such an essential item.
I see it daily that users ask to retrieve a file that has accidently been deleted or lost in some other way.

I also installed the SME V5 with 2 harddisks and a software mirror solution.
When it was running correctly, I unplugged one of the harddisks to simulate one harddisk crashing and the server kept on running perfectly and logged SCSI errors (because I used 2 SCSI disks).
Nothing wrong so far, still running perfectly.
The only thing that I did not get was a mail on the postmaster account that there was something wrong.
Now I would like to place the server on several small companies but I would like to reseave a mail from a remote location if the server had lost one drive before the other one stops running too.
Small but important things....

Developers of the E-Smith Server, you should put one person on monitoring the wish list and sift out the things that would improve your product even more and that are realisable.
Just stand above the people that only criticize but sift out the people with the good idea's and use them to improve your already good product.

I also have a technical question.
I would like to place the E-Smith server with several people that only have the possibility of an ISDN connection and have to think of the phone costs.
Is it possible to configure the server as a mailserver (not using the webserver part) and let the server only dail out when one of the users wants to fetch his or her email from the secondary emailserver at a ISP because not al people have the ability jet to have a DSL-connection.