What's New For Administrators

As of GNOME 2.14, the GNOME Project now includes an Administration Suite, which is a collection of tools that are aimed squarely at systems administrators. The two new tools that form the beginnings of this suite are incredibly powerful and should help administrators in both large corporate deployments and situations where machine lockdown is required.

2.1. Pessulus - Lockdown Editor

Pessulus is a lockdown editor that allows administrators to easily disable certain features of the GNOME desktop, as may be desired in corporate environments and Internet cafés. While lockdown features have now been available in GNOME for many years, Pessulus makes it far easier for administrators to perform these tasks.

Figure 19Using the lockdown editor to prevent system shutdown by users

Some of the features that can be disabled include:

  • Command-line access
  • The ability to shut down or reboot the machine
  • Access to specific protocols in the web browser
  • The ability to edit the GNOME panels

2.2. Sabayon - Profile Editor

Sabayon allows administrators to set up user profiles inside a live, interactive GNOME session. When a profile is created or edited, a nested GNOME session is started up, which the administrator can use to change GConf default and mandatory keys in their own GNOME session.

Figure 20Sabayon editing a user profile

Within the nested window a system administrator can create personalized profiles based on job description (e.g. receptionist, data entry clerk, programmer, human resources manager, etc.). These profiles can then be saved and deployed to various desktop machines with ease, saving the system administrator time. The profiles can also be modified and fine tuned as needed based on user feedback and since they are in a centralized location, allow for easy maintenance and deployment.