v1.0.10.1

Description

Vitalnix is a User Management Suite, complete with a user database framework and ACCDB-capable tools, as well as a CUI for administrating users.

ACCDB is the Unified Account Database, which provides a unified API to all outside applications who wish to access the user database, be it Shadow (/etc/passwd), LDAP, or anything else. The back-ends in turn can do anything underneath it wishes or requires to, it is up to the back-end. ACCDB can even use multiple user databases simultaneously, if wanted.

It also comes with a group of tools, collectively named the Spark UI1. It is a tool for the mass (un)registration of users within the system user database, but also provides support for single users. deletes users. It thus removes the need for adding each user manually. Currently, there is C-spark which runs on the console.

Technical aspects

Vitalnix and the core parts of it are written in C, though certain parts of it can be done in C++ too, or even totally different languages (using C hooks of course) if the developer wants to it. It currently runs on the Linux 2.4.x operating system on x86, "i686-athlon" and x86_64 (AMD64). Support for other OS and/or platforms is planned.

Future aim: problems

Obstacles in developing this software will be finding a good compromise between the features offered by the different user databases and providing them to the outside as a unified API, however this will be hardly a problem for UDBs which were natively written for Unix/etc.

Contents: General

Certain sub-documents listed here will have a version number below the actual one, which only indicates since which version that document applies. If the doc has not changed, it is still current.

doc/setup.html Installing and configuring Vitalnix

Contents: libaccdb - The Unified Account Database

doc/arch.html Architecture of Vitalnix
doc/sysprog.html ACCDB system utilities
doc/accdb_api.html The Unified Account Database API
doc/backend_api.html The backend module API
doc/backend_shadow.html Internals of the Shadow back-end module

Contents: Spark UI

doc/spark_ui.html SparkUI Readme
doc/sp_xmlds.html Specifications for SparkUI XML input

Other Documents

doc/spec_sdf.html SDF specification
doc/dev_todo.txt More-or-less comprehensive To-Do list
doc/FAL.txt Frontier Artistic License
doc/GPL2.txt GNU General Public License (version 2)

And of course there is the source tree.

Author and contributors

The original mass-enregistration Perl scripts were created by Eike Teiwes in 1997 (v0.7), 1998 (v0.8).
Jan Engelhardt <jengelh [at] linux01 gwdg de> had picked up keeping them up to date in fall 1999 and is the current maintainer since then.

  • Cristoph Thiel, Max-Plank-Gymnasium (MPG) Göttingen <cthiel [at] linux01 gwdg de>
  • Hans-Joachim Bauermeister, Berufsbildende Schulen II (BBS-2) Göttingen <acb [at] kki org>
  • Ludger Inhester, Theodor-Heuss-Gymnasium (THG) Göttingen <linhest [at] linux01 gwdg de>
  • Administrative Team, Bert-Brecht-Schule (BBS) Göttingen
  • Markus Boie, ???

1 It stands for nothing, but expands pretty good to System Program for Adding and Removing ... what?


December 24 2003 http://vitalnix.sf.net/