This is the textual form of the GOsa FAQ. Online information with comments is set up at Wiki: http://oss.gonicus.de/gosa/. Q: When creating many users for one department, I need to fill some fields again and again. Is there a shortcut for that? A: Just create a user template and pre-fill all values you need. You can use dynamic content, too: uid, sn and givenName will be replaced. i.E. an entry '/home/%uid' in homeDirectory will be replaced by the real uid of the user you're creating, %sn.%givenName@yourdomain.com creates proper email addresses, etc. Templates include group membership. Q: Can GOsa execute commands after creating/editing/removing users, departments, etc. A: Yes. Edit /etc/gosa/gosa.conf's menu section. Each plugin may have an entry "postremove", "postmodify" and "postcreate". You can use ldap attributes as command line options. i.E. postcreate="/usr/bin/sudo /usr/local/sbin/ftp.setperms %uid '%givenName'" Q: I'd like to modify the look of GOsa to fit our CI. How can I create an own theme? A: Themes are splitted into two parts. ihtml/ contains templates which generate the ui, html/ contains all parts that must be readable from clients. GOsa first looks for predefined files in the directory indirectly defined via the "theme" parameter in /etc/gosa/gosa.conf. If it can't find them here, it'll use the default one. So start over by copying html/themes/default to html/themes/yourtheme and ihtml/themes/default to ihtml/themes/yourtheme. Change gosa.conf to contain theme="yourtheme" in section main. Here are some files to edit: * login.tpl -> login screen * framework.tpl -> page contents * style.css -> stylesheets used by GOsa In fact, the rest of the UI is not converted to smarty, yet. Please be patient. Q: How can I let a person do administrative tasks under a specific department? A: Create a group inside this department. Put all administrative people inside, go to the "ACL" tab and check all fields these users should be able to adminstrate. Q: How can I permit users to change some of their own attributes? A: Same like the point above, but this rule only works for users own attributes by checking the box on the acl page. Q: What about applications? A: GOsa can manage desktop applications in ldap. Create a group and put all users in there, which have common desktop settings. Go to the "Application" tab and add all applications common to this group. Applications can be created from the application plugin. The idea behind this feature is a script running on the terminal-servers/ workstation which check for applications on login (or on a regular basis using timestamps). This one will create the corresponding icons on your KDE or GNOME desktop. Q: What's this terminal stuff? A: GOto is - similar to LTSP - a ldap based diskless client system. It is available from our projects page. Q: I can't select any mailservers. What's wrong? A: LDAP stores information about all your servers. The server plugin is not ready yet, so you've to adjust/add these entries using your favorite ldap tool. Q: GOsa is not in my native language, can I translate it to my language? A: Yes. Just go to the locale directory and copy the messages.po file somewhere else. Edit the copy and put your translations into the msgstr lines. To be included in next GOsa releases, you may want to send it to the GOsa maintainer. Finally you need to create a directory with your language code. (i.e. de for german) containing the LC_MESSAGES directory. Move your messages.po file there and run 'msgfmt messages.po' in that directory. That's it. You may need to restart apache, depending on your setup. On Debian, be sure to have your locale generated (dpkg-reconfigure locales) before. Q: The online help doesn't exist in my language, can i translate it to my language? A: Yes. Just go to the doc/guide/user/en directory and copy the lyx-source directory to a new directory in doc/guide/user/. You have to use the lyx program create the online help in your language. When you have finish just run ./gen_online_help from the gosa root directory to generate the online docs. Q: Can I specify some kind of password policies? A: You can place the keywords "pwminlen" and "pwdiffer" in the main section of your gosa.conf. "pwminlen" specifies how many characters a password must have to be accepted. "pwdiffer" contains the number of characters that must be different from the previous password. Note that these only affect passwords that are set by the user, not by the admins. Q: I've to update passwords on external windows PDCs. Can I add a command to let synchronize these for me? A: There's the possibility to add a password hook in gosa.conf's main section using the keyword "externalpwdhook". The specified command will be executed with three parameters: /path/to/your/script username oldpassword newpassword So you can call i.e. smbpasswd to handle your password change on the PDC. Q: What about templates for vacation messages? A: Create a directory to keep a set of vacation messages which are readable by the user that runs your apache. In this example I'll use /etc/gosa/vacation for that. Put your vacation files in there containing a "DESC:some descriptive text" as the first line followed by the normal vacation text. You can use all attributes from the generic tab. I.e.: /etc/gosa/vacation/business.txt ------------------------------------------------->8 DESC:Away from desk Hi, I'm currently away from my desk. You can contact me on my cell phone via %mobile. Greetings, %givenName %sn ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Place the config option vacationdir="/etc/gosa/vacation" in the location found in gosa.conf and a template box is show in the vacation mail tab. Q: How can I generate automatic ID's for user templates? A: Add an entry describing your id policy in gosa.conf, location section: a) using attributes You can specify LDAP attributes (currently only sn and givenName) in braces {} and add a percent sign befor it. Optionally you can strip it down to a number of characters, specified in []. I.e. idgen="{%sn}-{%givenName[2-4]}" will generate an ID using the full surename, adding a dash, and adding at least the first two characters of givenName. If this ID is used, it'll use up to four characters. If no automatic generation is possible, a input box is shown. b) using automatic id's I.e. specifying idgen="acct{id:3}" will generate a three digits id with the next free entry appended to "acct". idgen="ext{id#3}" will generate a three digits random number appended to "ext". Q: I'm migrating from the current LDAP, now GOsa does not allow uid's and group with upper/lower case and spaces. What can I do? A: Include the strict="no" keyword in your gosa.conf's location section. WARNING: using strict="no" will cause problems with cyrus/postfix!! Q: I'd like to place my users under ou=staff, not under ou=people. Can I change this? A: Yes. You can change the people and group locations by adding the following statements to your location sections: people="ou=staff" groups="ou=crowds" After logging in again, people and groups are created in the configured places. As a side note, you can leave these strings blank for flat structures, too. Q: I've problems with many objectClass violations/undefined attributes. Can GOsa check what's missing? A: Yes. Move away your gosa.conf and go to the GOsa setup. Follow the steps till you can download the config. If you get up to this point, your schema is ok... Q: I really don't want dn's containing the CN for user accounts because I don't want to support anonymous binds for uid resolution. Is it possible to have dn's containing the uid instead? A: Yes. Placing the dnmode="uid" keyword in your gosa.conf's location section will solve your problem. Q: Hey, I've installed GOsa, but it claims something about "SID and / or RIDBASE are missing in your configuration". What's wrong? A: You've configured GOsa to use samba3, but your LDAP has no samba domain object inside. Either log into samba for the first time to let it create that object, or supply the sid and ridbase for your domain in your gosa.conf's location, i.e.: ... ridbase="1000" sid="0-815-4711" \> Remember to fill in your real domain sid which is retrievable by the command "net getlocalsid". Q: We have massive performance problems with using samba as a member server. A: This is a known issue. We're working around this by putting ... sambaidmapping="true" ... \> into the configuration. GOsa will write the additional objectClass sambaIdmapEntry to the group and user objects. Q: I get 'The value specified as GID/UID number is too small' when forcing IDs. Why? A: This is an additional security feature, so that no one can fall back to uid 0. The default minimum ID is 100. You can set it to every value you like by specifying ... minid="40" ... \> in your configuration. In this example 40 will be the smallest ID you can enter. Q: Aahhrg. I've updated to a new version and my gosa.conf seems to be broken. A: Some parameters have changed. Please call the fix_config.sh script which is in the contrib directory. Q: I've saved my windows workstations in other locations like GOsa is doing it for decades. Is there a way to change this? A: Yes. Use the winstation parameter in your location section: ... winstations="ou=machineaccounts" ... \> Q: GOsa doesn't seem to follow my referrals. What can I do? A: Place the option 'recursive = "true"' inside your locations definition and you should be fine. Q: I'd like to have TLS based LDAP connections from within GOsa. Is this possible? A: Yes, add
... tls="true" ... \> to the main section of GOsa. This switch affects all LDAP connections. Q: Cyrus folder get created in the style user.username. I prefer the unix hirachy style user/username. Is it possible to change this? A: Yes, add
... cyrusunixstyle="true" ... \> to the main section of GOsa and the folders are created in unix style. Q: I'd like to do special checks for several plugin parameters. How can I modify GOsa to take care of these checks? A: No need to modify anything. Just add a hook the the plugin you'd like to check: check="/your/command/binary" This binary will get an ldif to STDIN for analysis and may write an error message to STDOUT. Note, that the supplied ldif may NOT be the original target ldif due to technical reasons. Q: Is there a way to use ACL independet filtering when using administrative units? A: Yes. Set STRICT_UNITS to "true" in your gosa.conf's location section. Q: How can i active the account expiration code for the gosa interface? A: Yes. Just set "account_expiration" to "true" in your gosa.conf's main section.