Samba4 and SWAT

[James Tandy]

Hello everyone :)

First a bit of background...

I am currently configuring 2 opensuse servers for use as samba3 PDC's 
for windows XP Clients (totally different domains)
With Samba3 its a bit of a nightmare, so I eagerly await samba4 :)

I currently use the SWAT interface for basic remote admin (adding shares 
etc).
It would be a shame to see this go in samba4, but after a (brief) search 
of the mailing list i found this comment by Simo.

>I'd kill the swat concept completely.
>We are much better of providing an API to let people that understand
>better than us how do build UIs to do basic configuration steps like.

>Ideally it would provide high level functions like: "make this server a
>Domain Controller" or "join this server to this domain as member|dc".

>we have some of this in samba 3.2 libnet/libsmbconf it would be nice to
>design a consistent interface for samba4

>Simo.



The API idea sounds excellent, and if the conccept of swat is to live at 
all, I would like to volunteer to help produce (or continue developing) 
and maintain a web interface, which could be shipped with samba4, and 
utilise the new API (the new SWAT perhaps?)

I am a PHP developer, and also have experience of ASP/VB.net.
I've looked through the swat directory provided with the alpha3 release 
but it makes little sense to me! (all i can guess is that you are using 
a custom http server, and those files are the format is uses)

Despite this, I would be willing to learn whatever language the current 
swat is written in as i for one find it an incredibly useful tool, and i 
wouldn't like to see it disappear in samba 4.

Regards,

James Tandy