Upcoming Simian Release -- Overhauled Admin Web UI with Package Admin functionality and much more.

[Justin McWilliams]

Greetings Simian Discuss,

We wanted to let you know that very soon we will release a new version of Simian with an overhauled admin web UI.

Please have a look at the examples given below, and let us know your thoughts. We're interested in hearing your feedback on the existing and upcoming features, and also anything you can dream up as a future feature! 

- Justin, John, and (our awesome intern) Kevin from the Simian engineering team.

Web-based Package Management

Never use the MPCC CLI again!

1) Using HTML forms, upload a raw pkginfo directly copied/pasted from makepkginfo, and a DMG associated with the pkginfo.


2) Use common HTML form controls to change the details of the meta-data; set install_types, unattended_install mode, display_name, description, and more.  Below you’ll see Photoshop is not in any base manifest, as we’ll only want to deploy it to specific users or hosts.

3) Edit the raw XML plist, if you wish to edit values that are not exposed in the HTML form above.

4) Use Manifest Modifications to push the package to a set of Users, Hosts, Sites, OS Versions, or Tags (see below for more).

Speedy Pagination and Install Results Download Speed

All reports have been lowered to display a small subset of results by default, with the ability to choose to see more results in a single page if desired. This makes the admin interface much snappier and immediately responsive to admin actions.  Furthermore, for Installs specifically, you can now see the download speed of the package.

Tags

Admins can assign arbitrary string “tags” to hosts, which can be used to track various types of clients.  Manifest Modifications also allows for pushing (or removing) a particular package to all hosts with a given Tag.

Package Admin

The Package Admin is slimmer and sleeker.  Admins can see what catalogs and manifest packages are in with a glance, quickly view pkginfo plists, download package DMGs, etc.

Host Report Overhaul

When viewing a single host, some admins can now view and set tags, view the average download speed for a particular client, and more.  Remaining Packages To Install now also includes Apple Updates.

Active Clients and Patch Compliance Reports

As with previous releases, admins can see the number of 30, 14, 7, and 1 day active clients. In the upcoming release, admins can also see the Munki and Apple Update patch compliance within each of these buckets.  This report is available for all clients managed by Simian, as well as any search result set; that is, admins can see patch compliance for any search of a given OS Version, Site, User, etc.

Apple Updates Admin

As of our last Simian release, the Apple Updates UI allows admins to select which groups of computers various Apple Updates are made available to.

We hope to soon add functionality here allowing admins to choose if a particular update should install in the background, similar to unattended_install, or forcefully install and reboot the computer, similar to force_install_after_date.

We've always been logging Apple Update changes, but the logs were never exposed. The upcoming Simian release displays the logs of all Apple Update changes, including automatic promotions. Admins are also alerted via email when auto-promotions occur.

And more!

[Justin McWilliams]

Greetings,

We've released the source for Simian 2.0 RC1.  We've given our documentation a quick "once over", and we'll be working in the next couple of days on a larger overhaul.

Quick download: http://simian.googlecode.com/files/simian-2.0_rc1.tar.gz

Source: http://code.google.com/p/simian/source/browse/

As a reminder, we'll be hosting office hours next Monday, March 12th, at 1PM Eastern on Google+ and IRC.  See the Project Page for more details!

- Justin, John and Kevin of the Simian engineering team.

[Justin McWilliams]

Greetings Simian followers,

A new release candidate (RC3) has been pushed, with the following release notes:

- server settings and certificate config are 100% web based, with validation.
- client settings centralized to settings.cfg, with validation.
- hovering over a UUID anywhere in the web UI fetches basic host data.
- XSRF protection added to all web POST handlers.
- refactored CSS and JavaScript source.
- menu UI tweaks.
- several bug fixes.

The Wiki docs have gone through another iteration of updates as well; they're quite a bit slimmer due to the server settings being web based, and copy/pastable certificate authority generation.

We hope this is our final 2.0 release... but please do continue to report any snags or bugs in your testing!

Thanks,

- Justin, John and Kevin* of the Simian engineering team.

* Today is Kevin's last day with us.  It's been great having him, and we'd like to extend one final THANK YOU for interning at Google and helping out with Simian development!!!

[Allister Banks]

Just wanted to second the thanks for Kevin! Best of luck. 

I'll be testing again, and after repeating the manual CA setup steps, I'm hoping to use Puppet's CA once, too. Great weekend, all!

Allister 

[nbalonso]

I also like to thank you all guys, the project has an amazing look. The new server setup is much more user friendly and the commands on the wiki now avoid having to rename few stuff plus the new serials.txt

From my testing today I appreciate two small things

-The "make test" still does not work if you don't satisfy the "make swig" first on a 10.7 vanilla (maybe just add it to the wiki?) 

-An the "make dmg" (I believe) tries to recognize the client certificates from the etc/simian/ssl/certs and fails for me. Also it does not like having .DS_Store files around the ssl folder. 

I saw that the created tarballs as suggested in the SimianAndCertificates section don't have the same structure, they have the server and CA public certificates in the ssl/certificates, but no luck with that distribution when running the "make dmg" either

The error I get

########################

INFO:root:Validating pem files found in ssl dir

INFO:root:Validating pem inside etc/simian/ssl/certs

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "src/simian/util/validate_settings.py", line 116, in <module>

    sys.exit(main(sys.argv))

  File "src/simian/util/validate_settings.py", line 112, in main

    Validate()

  File "src/simian/util/validate_settings.py", line 100, in Validate

    FindPemAndValidate(settings)

  File "src/simian/util/validate_settings.py", line 57, in FindPemAndValidate

    ValidatePem, (settings, 'cert'))

  File "/private/var/zzz/hadmin/Desktop/simian/VE/bin/../lib/python2.5/posixpath.py", line 290, in walk

    func(arg, top, names)

  File "src/simian/util/validate_settings.py", line 40, in ValidatePem

    f = open(fname_full, 'r')

IOError: [Errno 21] Is a directory

make: *** [settings_check] Error 1

########################

It may be that I messed up with something, but cannot figure out what :S

Noel

[John Randolph]

Hi Noel, I'll be taking a look at the issues you encountered here today. Glad you like the new UI & setup rewrites.

--
John Randolph -- Google New York -- Corp Platforms Eng

[John Randolph]

On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 12:45 PM, nbalonso <nbal...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Noel, 

regarding #1

I revised the output from the swig_check rule to make it harder to overlook that the Makefile is wiling to install swig for you.

the reason that I am downloading/building/installing swig in a separate rule is to make it obvious why we are asking you to sudo on your machine.

regarding #2

can you please send us the output of "find etc" from inside your simian build/working directory. please be careful to scrub any serial numbers if you followed our naming convention in the wiki and find them sensitive.

thanks!

[nbalonso]

Hi John,

thanks on #1 

Update on #2

I was able to build the dmg by deleting both the etc/simian/ssl/certs and etc/simian/ssl/private_keys ,then the make dmg created a clean installer with no client certificates (as expected)

Installed clean with no issues and now working on learn to create catalogs and import pkgs

Regards,

Noel

El lunes 2 de abril de 2012 21:50:18 UTC+3, John Randolph escribió: