lwio: The Three Key Scenarios for April 2009

My wife read my blog the other day and her comment was “its pretty technical”. Polite speak for saying “Does anybody really care about what you’re writing?” Well, here’s is a short note on what we’re going to accomplish by middle of April.

We have three key end user scenarios that we’re shooting for. Recall that our objective is to make Linux,UNIX and Mac systems first class citizens in a Windows centric corporate intranet. Here are the scenarios.

The first scenario lets an system administrator log into his Windows XP desktop. He logs in using his Active Directory credentials. He then launches the Windows MMC console and loads up the “Local Users and Groups” snapin. when asked to select a machine to manage, he enters his Ubuntu Linux server machine that has also been joined to Active Directory using our Likewise authentication agent. The MMC “Local Users and Groups” snapin allows the administrator to create a “local user” on the Ubuntu server, set a password for this user.

The administrator can then launch putty on his Windows desktop and open up and ssh session to the Ubuntu server. When prompted for credentials, he can use the “local user” that he just created from his Windows MMC session.

The second scenario
For the second scenario, the administrator can reopen his MMC “Local Users and Groups” snapin, and now add “local user” to the “Administrators” pre-defined group on the Ubuntu server. He can now add a new snapin – the Share Management snapin to his existing MMC session. When prompted to enter the name of server where he would like to manage shares, the administrator enters the same Ubuntu server running the Likewise SMB server. When asked for administrator credentials, the administrator can enter the “local user” and the “local user’s” password. Bingo, MMC will now be able to add, delete, manage SMB shares on a Ubuntu server running lwio. The administrator now creates a share assigns a local directory on the Ubuntu box to be managed.

The third scenario
The third scenario starts right up where the second scenario leaves off. The administrator now fires up a command shell on his Windows XP client and enters the following commands.

net use Z: \\UbuntuServer\Shared Pictures /u:”local user” password
Z:
dir – lets him see a listing of all the files in the share
copy z:\*.* c: – lets him copy his pictures on the Ubuntu share to his Windows client
copy c:\NewPictures\*.* z: – lets him copy his new pictures on his Windows client to his Ubuntu share

Summing it all up, lwio is our next set of distributed systems infrastructure that takes Window interoperability with Linux,UNIX and Mac to never before seen heights. Oh, and did I mention that this functionality will be available on all 130+ flavors of UNIX, Linux, Mac. lwio is our programmable SMB, named pipes and DCE/RPC infrastructure that allows us to build a host of Windows interoperable technologies on non-Windows systems. lwio comes with a new integrated SMB server, an integrated SMB client, a named pipe interface and a DCE/RPC runtime retroffited with named pipe support.

Please write and let me know if this works as a decent elevator pitch of the lwio end user scenarios.

Thanks for reading!