Hi all,
I come from an educational server project where we are looking to expand our modules with a Student Management System. The server we have developed is based on the latest Ubuntu LTS Server and adds besides Samba4 for useraccounts and filesharing, a lot of other modules, including Networking Services, Mail, Electronic Learning, Home Access, Owncloud, VPN etc…
I searched these forums but could not find anything about LDAP/Samba4/AD support for Gibbon. Is there a possibility that Gibbon can support LDAP/Samba4/AD connectivity, now or in the near future? It would make the possibilities for Gibbon a LOT bigger when you want to integrate it in an existing school environment.
I am curious about your reactions and the options available for Gibbon.
robb_nl, thanks for getting in touch. Your project looks cool, and it is great to see Linux being focused more for education. I do understand the power of LDAP and other directory services, but Gibbon does not provide this, and until now no one has asked.
I am guessing you hope to use Gibbon as an LDAP client, to pull accounts from an LDAP server? Or do you foresee Gibbon being the LDAP server, and provisioning account inforation to other systems?
I would definitely consider it for a future version, but at the moment have no developer-side experience in this area. Do you have or know any developers who might be interested in helping Gibbon get set up for directory services?
Thanks,
Ross
Hi Ross, thnx for the response.
I would like to see Gibbon pull users from (in my case) Samba4 as a client. All the modules we use are LDAP/Samba ‘enabled’ so, in case of users can log in with 1 set of credentials. Also Moodle is implemented and it would be great if we could connect the learning module with the student management system.
Since Gibbon is already around for a long time, it seems almost weird (at least for me as a sysadmin) that noone has ever asked for connectivity with a central accounting service. I mean… Doing administration double is never good…
May I ask in what kind of environments Gibbon particularly is used? (primary-, secondary education? universities?)
regards,
robb
btw, (and this might be an option for gibbon too) some of the applications in our project pull users from Samba and put it in a local database. Then sync those accounts it in a scheduled way.
Robb,
Thanks for the input. Gibbon tends to be used in smaller schools, and so the overhead of not having synced/director accounts is not so bad. That would be my take as to the reason we are in this situation.
I have made a not of your request as item 26 in the v12 Todo List, and we will see if we can get it implemented in due course.
Gibbon is mostly used in Secondary and K-12 settings, although there is some interest from the university sector as well.
Cheers,
Ross
Hi Ross,
Thnx for the effort! It is highly appreciated.
off topic, but have you heard of Karoshi linux? Its a great open source school server system, and I would really like to see Gibbon being integrated into it.
athar1, Karoshi looks interesting, and great to see more open source aimed at schools. If you set up Karoshi with a standard LAMP stack, it should be able to run Gibbon with no problems. What kind of extra integration would you like to see?
athar1: have a look at thge link in my first post 
I come form linuxschools/karoshi linux and asked this to integrate gibbon in karoshi linux server.
oh thats great
Just to add an update on the Samba/LDAP effort. Two of our coders looking into this at our recent Hackathon, as a feature for v12, but it was deemed to require more domain-specific expertise than we currently have. Given limited resources, we have had to shelve this feature, in favour of other initiatives we have going on (such as an upcoming rewrite to make Gibbon much more object oriented). Apologies for this. Perhaps you can look to contact some outside coders to contribute this to Gibbon.
I had lost gibbon a bit out of my sight. Too bad it takes more than expected since it still would make a great extra module for Karoshi Server.
If you have any updates on LDAP/Samba4/Active Directory integration, I would like top hear it.
I know someone who has quite some LDAP expertise, but he is not a coder. Maybe the developer of Karoshi Server could help out? I can ask…
Robb, I do appreciate the potential value of this feature, but my expertise in this area is limited, as is my time to commit to such changes. If the developer of Karoshi Server was interested in contributing, that would be amazing, and we could help to facilitate that…