SGD 4.4 first looks

I have just found a few minutes to try out Sun SGD 4.4 - I performed the quickest install that I could just to see how it all looks.

Platform :

• Xen DomU - single processor - 768 Mb memory.
• CentOS 4.4 - fairly minimal install

Install :

(MD5 for reference)

1213cb27be8437375914b2d63b8d3c8e tta-4.40-907.i386.rpm

The package now weighs just over 200Mb, still not bad considering that a full apache/tomcat and a couple of JRE's are packaged inside. The install is more-or-less unchanged - we still default to HTTP on port 80/tcp for the browser interface.

Packages that I found myself installing (SGD is not dependent on them, but some are needed for some features to work) :

• firefox (for testing)
• xauth (to make stuff work)
• xterm (kinda useful)
• blackbox (minimal window manager for full-screen session)
• ghostscript (Needed for SGD printing - also installs some font packages for dependencies that are useful for firefox/blackbox)

Initial observations :

Post install we are now greeted with slightly new screen :

Click to enlarge.

Note that we now have PDF versions of the documentation and, most importantly we have a link to the "Sun Secure Global Desktop Administration Console". Ooooooo.

There is nothing that an end-user will immediately notice as different from either 4.3 or 4.31, but an administrator gets the new browser-based console to play with.

As an introduction the new interface gives you the opportunity to familiarize yourself with the new terminology - although I wouldn't expect for there to be too much confusion.

Click to enlarge.

After dismissing the 'help' the first view is of the SGD servers - here you can see that I have just one - with a basic status report.

Click to enlarge.

The new browser-based interface consolidates both Object Manager and Array Manager, so the new interface presents controls for everything that would have been tuned in Array Manager including all the Protocol Engine settings.

Click to enlarge.

While most of the screens are clean, I get the feeling that some were created in a hurry, for example the log-filter interface could do with a bit of an update - perhaps some graphical control instead of a giant textbox?

Applications (and users and other stuff) is still presented in a treeview, although I think that there will be a tendency to leave applications in the 'root' of the tree, rather than sorting them away nicely. The other small glitch, related to the above, is that in order to move a person (User Profile) from one place to another, you have to use a rather clunky cut-paste operation.

Click to enlarge.

Finally (for now) lets take a look at the config screen for an application. You can see that all the settings that you would expect are there - although they have been re-arranged onto new/different screens.

Click to enlarge.

Overall I would say that the new interface shows great promise. It should make it easier for the developers to introduce new functionality to the product and to the admin UI.

If you are familiar with the Object Manager / Array Manager applications then it will take a little while to get used to the new interface, some things aren't where you'll expect them to be and some terminology has changed, but the effort will reward you in the long term.

SGD version 4.4

I am downloading now and can't tell you what it's really like (although I'll try and post a review soon), but Sun have released the next version of SGD :

http://www.scl.com/products/sun/sgd/version4.4

If you're a release-notes whore, (like myself) then head for :

http://www.scl.com/products/sun/sgd/820-2548.pdf

Not that exciting, but kinda useful is formal support for RHEL 5 this will make my life a little easier for the SGD Administrator training courses that I run here.

Sun SGD on FC6

I have just taken delivery of a nice new Sun X4100 (M2) server and, as a quick test I decided to install Sun SGD (4.3.915) on the box.

As this is a nice 64bit platform, and I'd used the x86_64 version of FC6 I was a couple of libs short :

[root@xxxxxxxx ~]# rpm -Uvh ./tta-4.30-915.i386.rpm error: Failed dependencies: libXt.so.6 is needed by tta-4.30-915.i386 libgdbm.so.2 is needed by tta-4.30-915.i386 libXp.so.6 is needed by tta-4.30-915.i386

As SGD is still built as a 32 bit application you will need, at least, the i386 (32 bit) versions of libXt, libXp and gdbm

yum install libXt.i386 libXp.i386 gdbm.i386

It should then mostly work.

(as an aside, if you are attempting to install on a really cut-down RHEL4 box and the PDF printing is failing then you may need to install ghostscript)