I have been working with the UCS on a test system for a few weeks now and really love the system. It installed very easily, created an AD domain perfectly that computers could join, samba shares worked great. The only thing I cannot find or figure out how to install is a file manager that will work in the web interface. Is there any way to install a file manager for the web console in order to manage files on the server directly…ie copy, paste, move, etc. This would make adding ISO images to the pool MUCH simpler for creating virtual machines…
it is somehow up to you but I would recommend against doing such work on the server itself. And we definitely do not have such a module.
If you really, really want you could install the KDE app and use whatever is available there. Access to KDE can be done remotely, afaik.
Otherwise: it is a server. If you want to move files do it through shares. It should be easy to create a share and access this share from a client. Then you can do whatever you want with your files- even giving the share as a storage for virtualization.
adding to what Christian already said: implementing a file manager that can access all files in the system is hard or even impossible to do securely. The web server runs as an unprivileged user, www-data. It doesn’t have access to many parts of the system only the super user, root, has access to. There are ways to circumvent this, but all of them have severe drawbacks.
Personally my go-to method for such a use case is to create a Samba share for the root file system and only allowing members of the Domain Admins group. Additionally the share must use the force user setting with root as the value so that the actual file system access will occur as root instead of the domain user connecting to the share.
If you’re willing to work in text mode I suggest you log in via ssh as root and give mc a try (Midnight Commander, a text-mode file manager modeled after the old Norton Commander tool). You’ll have to install the mc package first.
Thanks for the replies. Yes, I understand the security risks of running a file manager on a server and really did not have a much need for one, except…when trying to install a virtual machine from a ISO file, I needed to mount the ISO as a CD ROM in the virtual machine and discovered the ISO images needed to be copied to the /var/lib/libvert/images/ folder in order to be recognized for install. This is where a file manager would be helpful. Mosu…the MC option worked perfectly in this case, as I was able to copy the ISO to a share I already had on the server…then move it with MC to the correct file folder. So, that was a great solution.
I still think a file manager would be a helpful tool on the web console. As someone else mentioned in another thread, WEBMIN had this ability, which allows an administrator the ability to access user folders to make changes to permissions, etc on a file or folder when needed. If the file manager was only accessible with the root priviledges…say another login as root to access the file manager…I think this would circumvent the security issue.
Anyway, thanks for the tip on MC…that was a perfect work around.