phpSATk - PHP System Administration Toolkit

phpSATk Version 0.1 (Tech preview) released

nospam@example.com (Moritz Bechler) — Sun, 20 May 2007 15:06:01 +0200

I'm very proud to be able to announce version 0.1 of phpSATk to you. I've been developing on it for over a year right now and would really like to hear what other people do think about it.

phpSATk is built to be a toolkit for building extensible and maintainable applications which perform common system and network administrative tasks. My main intent for building these applications is to be able to delegate common tasks in my network to non-technical people while allowing for more generic managment applications giving me full insight to my system - both kinds of applications sharing as much code as possible. This toolkit is meant to take as much of the common work (buiding views, forms, ...) from the developer and provide interfaces to common services. One of the core components of it is what I call XDOs (eXtensible data objects) which provide a object oriented abstracted interface to whatever you like to - having some very useful and unique features.

The main goal of this release is to present you the concepts and capabilities of phpSATk, do not consider it a full-blown product or stable - it isn't as I'm dependent on you feedback, ideas and criticism to make it that. The design and APIs are subject to change in the feature.

The roadmap to 0.1 was
- Core
- Request handling/basic controllers
- Authentication and Authorization
- Templates
- eXtensible DataObjects and DataSets
- Form generation
and I think I got these things pretty well. There's quite a lot "real" documentation missing but I hope that I can compensate for this by providing personal support for interested people, prefered ways are to contact me via the mailing list or on IRC, directions can be found here.

Help is always wanted - if you are willing to contribute fell free to contact me.

This release includes some sample applications (which are usable but not feature-complete):
- authApp, a tool for managing phpSATk internal users, roles and access control lists
- jobServer, a tool for managing phpSATk's background job facilities
- CA, a small application for managing your X.509 PKI (revocation list support requires a PHP patch - here)
- krbAdmin, a small application for managing kerberos principals and policies (requires a PHP extension - here)

Download:
phpsatk-0.1.tar.bz2 (MD5: 1febf1fa249631451d27517acb923741)
phpsatk-0.1.tar.gz (MD5: 809a6314e9763e9843335498dcd19734)
phpsatk-0.1.zip (MD5: 0b68a6c0cfcf7eef0baa1be5f7def2de)

Roadmap to Version 0.1

nospam@example.com (Moritz Bechler) — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 10:36:06 +0100

I told you that I would soon release a preview version but in my opinion there are some things to fix/improve before, so here comes a roadmap to version 0.1:

- The XDO subsystem need to get a clean up - there is too much hacked code and I need to improve some things for making them more flexible. I will also work on including the view definition stuff into dataset view generation.
- Add support for hierarchical DataSets
- Improve the search capabilities in the XDO subsystem.
- The ACL/Authorization subsystem is kind of a hack right now, it needs a uniform managing interface and more flexibility. Making this work really is a challenge and some decisions need to be made, so this will take some time.
- Provide some installation helpers (sql dumps and maybe some more)

Updated: ACL development has made some progress
Update: Although I'm kind of busy at the moment I'm taking the final steps for the release.

Source code metrics

nospam@example.com (Moritz Bechler) — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 04:56:38 +0100

I just set up an account at ohloh, which is a nice service providing source code metrics for open source projects.
You can find phpSATk here: http://ohloh.net/projects/3939

It actually shows a comment line ratio of 62% which impressed me quite much. And it shows that there is only one developer working on the project ... you might want to change this

And they have this nice badge:

CA Application development

nospam@example.com (Moritz Bechler) — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 21:14:01 +0100

As some might know, when you have found this page, I'm working on a CA Application based on phpSATk at the moment which works pretty good now but is lacking one important feature - generating CRLs - for which actually there has been no support in PHP by now so I wrote a patch bringing this functionally to PHP and have submitted it today to php.internals.

l33t "security specialists"

nospam@example.com (Moritz Bechler) — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 14:04:04 +0100

I just noticed, that when you search for phpSATk in google you will find various posts of some "advisory" (including a "exploit") of some ~~l33t idiot kiddie~~ hacker which obviously has been posted a month ago (of course I was not notified). You can find the whole story here. First this is funny because the distribution (called beta1) they thought they hacked is 2 years old and I know about nobody (including myself) who is using it - I discontinued it in favor of a php5 version before it was usable. It seems like they were using some automatic scanning tool ~~or do really have no clue what they are talking about~~ because there obviously is no such vulnerability (look here and if you really want to - look at the code). On the other side this really sucks because everyone looking for phpSATk will now find some bogus security advisory.

To emphasize this again: This is not the software developed now and the security hole they claim to have found does not exist.

Upcoming release 0.1

nospam@example.com (Moritz Bechler) — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 11:48:41 +0100

Starting with today this new site will be the development base (although there's only one developer yet - yes, it's me) featuring a wiki for documentation, nightly built API documentation, a issue tracker (for bugs and feature requests) and access to the subversion repository.

I'm looking forward to release a preview version (let's call it 0.1) to the public to reach some possibly interested people and I'm really looking forward to ideas, requests and critisism allowing me to get the design and thereby the API stable.

My patches to PHPTAL were finally integrated into version 1.1.8 the PHPTAL distribution.

Welcome to the new phpSATk site

nospam@example.com (Moritz Bechler) — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 11:25:47 +0100

For the majority that doesn't know what's this all about: phpSATk is intended to be a Framework (and some kind of application server) helping network/system administrators to write small (or even larger) management applications. In my opinion using standard techniques this is a very unproductive task making you spend a huge amount of time on things like form processing (if done securely and user friendly) which do not add to the application's core functionality. phpSATk tries to help you with that. Also it tries to force and support you in making your applications extensible and interoperable. (more to come...)

There are not yet any real application built based on phpSATk and you're also not adviced to do so, because the API is not stable yet.

Features include (yet) ...

Continue reading "Welcome to the new phpSATk site"