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Another GP Offering for Unix/Linux

I saw an announcement today by Symark that they are now entering the AD/Unix/Linux authentication space already populated by folks like Vintela, Centrify and Likewise. Symark has been around for a while but were focused more on policy-based management of Unix/Linux system security rather than Windows integration. But that changes with their new ADVantage solution, which puts them squarely into this crowded market. Most interestingly for me, they are yet another vendor offering Group Policy management of Unix/Linux systems. From screenshots on their site, it appears that they’ve taken the same approach as some of the other vendors of extending Group Policy using custom ADM templates that get read and translated by non-Windows systems into meaningful configuration commands for those platforms.

It will be interesting to see where this goes. That now makes 4 vendors that I know of who are doing heteregeneous Group Policy management, so it will be interesting to see if this market moves forward from managing basic configuration options on non-Windows platforms to doing the real interesting systems and application configuration tasks that could be done using this technology. So far, from what I’ve seen, most of these folks have taken baby steps in terms of what is possible. Maybe a new player in the space will urge all of them forwards!

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Group Policy, Symark, Unix-Linux Group Policy Management

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Categories: General Stuff

Tags: Group Policy, Symark, Unix-Linux Group Policy Management

About the Author:

Darren Mar-Elia is CTO & Founder of SDM Software, Inc. Darren has over 25 years of IT and Software experience in the Microsoft technology area, including serving as a Director in Infrastructure at Charles Schwab, CTO of Windows Management Solutions at Quest Software, and Sr. Director of Product Engineering at DesktopStandard. He has been a Microsoft MVP in Group Policy technology for the last 6 years and has written and spoken on Active Directory, Group Policy and PowerShell topics frequently over the years. He maintains the popular Group Policy resource web site at www.gpoguy.com and has been a contributing editor for Windows IT Pro Magazine since 1997. He has written and contributed to twelve books on Windows. Darren also speaks frequently at conferences on Windows infrastructure topics.

Discussion

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Rob April 1, 2008

Darren, Re:”That now makes 4 vendors that I know of who are doing heteregeneous Group Policy management, so it will be interesting to see if this market moves forward from managing basic configuration options on non-Windows platforms to doing the real interesting systems and application configuration tasks that could be done using this technology.”
Both Centrify and Likewise software in their current 4.0 products allow quite deep configuration of systems/application management. Admitiedly, they’re not as far along as the new GP-Preferences, but they’re both quite far along on the OS management side.
Also, in my tests of Centrify and Likewise, they’re not using custom ADM templates any more, since those have limited feature-sets. They’re now adding extensions to the policy engine in some fashion.
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Darren April 1, 2008

Rob-
Thanks for the update about the ADMs. Good to know that these folks are moving away from that towards “CSE-like” behavior.
In terms of the more advanced stuff I was referring, no doubt that these guys are getting more sophisticated on OS configuration. The Mac stuff Centrify is doing is very thorough. I think, however, that there is plenty of additional opportunity to move beyond just OS config and into server app. configuration (e.g. app servers, web servers, etc.) and that is what I haven’t seen yet. But then again, it doesn’t really exist that much on Windows so I suppose I’m not surprised. I just think the opportunity to use GP in more interesting ways is there!
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