samba-mirror/swat/help/welcome.html

Welcome to SWAT!<p>

This is a online demonstration of the current version of the Samba Web
Administration Tool. This tool is still being written so you'll find
it looks very rough at this stage.<p>

Normally this opening page would contain the (as yet unwritten) welcome
blurb for SWAT, giving basic instructions on how to use it. I've put
this bit of waffle in its place for the moment. <p>

Also note that SWAT normally demands authentication before showing you
this page, otherwise anyone could modify your smb.conf! I've disabled
that for this demo.<p>

<H2>Features</H2>

Here are some of the features we want to eventually incorporate.<p>

<ul>
<li> start/stop server
<li> password changing
<li> manage smbpasswd (add/delete users etc)
<li> be able to run the disgnosis steps from DIAGNOSIS.txt
<li> status monitoring (smbstatus style)
<li> be able to kill off individual connections
<li> wizard style config building
</ul>

There are also some obvious flaws with what has already been done:

<ul>
<li> help is ghastly
<li> ordering of parameters needs to be looked at
<li> some parameters which are share parameters need to be available at
     the global level (especially "hosts allow" and friends)
<li> images are just doodles 
</ul>

On the positive side, here are some good features of SWAT:

<ul>
<li> built in mini web server so you don't need a web server installed to
manage a Samba server, you just need a browser
<li> links to loadparm.c so it automatically makes available new
parameters as they are added to Samba.
<li> it's quite small (around 500 lines of code currently) 
<li> layout and dialog building is done automatically based on the type 
fields in loadparm.c
</ul>

<A HREF="mailto:mtippett@linuxsa.org.au">Matthew Tippett</A> is the
main one doing SWAT work besides myself. He is especially looking at
the layout and GUI design of the system which is something I am
terrible with :-)<p>

-- <p>
<A HREF="http://samba.anu.edu.au/~tridge">Andrew Tridgell</A>