I saw an impressive dome earlier this week from Andrew Tridgell at the Canberra Linux User’s Group of some of the work being done on the install process of Samba version 4. Basically, the first time you start up smbd (which didn’t look to need any actual installation steps) it starts up an inbuilt web server which will let you connect and start configuring it (right not you authenticate with the machine root user, but there’s ongoing discussion apparently). It’s a really nice way to get beginner sys-admins started without them hitting road blocks 5 times before they can even get started.
Over the last couple of weeks, a couple of other free software projects have impressed me with bit’s of their install process as well. I wouldn’t have dreamed of attempting to install Scarab since I’ve never done anything with Tomcat in the past, but then I discovered that it ships with it’s own integrated copy of tomcat. More than enough for my personal use, and it all worked quite cleanly (except for all those bloody environment variables). I was also quite pleased to find this Ruby on Rails install tutorial for Mac OS X used SQLite which ships as part of Tiger. Unfortunately they did force me to integrate with apache (I would have used the apparently built in WEBrick but have no real idea how). It could have been a lot slicker if it had just created the SQLite databases itself, but I guess I just love it when installing one thing doesn’t cascade on to 10 other tasks.
One of the guys at work has been looking for a little web server we can embed in our system to get people started, and ideally let us avoid messing with any existing apache installation, so hopefully I’ll get to see some of the implementation behind this stuff first hand.