Description

Vitalnix is a User Management Suite, complete with ACCDB and ACCDB-capable tools as well as an (optional) CUI/GUI for administratig 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.

Daxtraq is a tool for the mass registration of users within the system user database. It finds the differences between a given list and the user database, adds and deletes users. It thus removes the need for adding each user manually. Extendability is very high, the most important things are modularized, and by using ACCDB, the possibilities are infinite.

Technical aspects

Vitalnix and the core parts of it are written in C, though certain parts of it can be done in C++ too if the devloper wants to it. Currently it runs under Linux, and support for other OSes is planned.

History

Daxtraq was developed in 1996 at the Otto-Hahn-Gymnasia (college) to help adding and deleting students' accounts as they came and went each year. (The first time, it was 1200 users, then about 200 every consecutive year.) It used direct file operations until 2003, when LDAP (or a hook for LDAP) was requested. So the design of Daxtraq ought to change to support multiple backends. It turned out to be better to modularize and separate certain parts, so it was split up into libaccdb and Daxtraq.

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

This manual describes Vitalnix version 1.90.8.5.

doc/02_setup.html Installing and configuring Vitalnix

Contents: libaccdb - The Unified Account Database

doc/10_arch.html Architecture of Vitalnix
doc/11_accdb_util.html ACCDB system utilities
doc/12_libaccdb.html The Unified Account Database
doc/20_backend.html The backend module API -- how to write a module
doc/21_back_shadow.html Internals of the Shadow back-end module

Contents: Daxtraq

doc/30_daxtraq.html Daxtraq Readme
doc/39_corediff.html Finding differences -- some words about the algorithm
daxtraq-src/ptui.c find_changes(): Finding differences - Gory details throughout commented code what/why it does it
doc/40_ds_api.html Internals of the Data Source module API -- how to write a module
doc/41_ds_sdf.html Data -- Source SDF File Specifications
doc/42_ds_xml.html Data -- Source Tags for an XML Data Source


November 19 2003, v1.90.8.5