Zentyal Desktop for Windows XP and 7 clients

Introduction

Zentyal Desktop for Windows is intended to be installed on the desktop clients (workstations) running Windows XP or Windows 7 of a network managed by Zentyal Server, acting as a PDC as well. It should also run without problem on Windows Vista, although it has not been tested on it.

Currently it consists on two things:

• A tool for the auto-configuration of desktop clients for the services provided by Zentyal (mail, samba, Jabber, VoIP, ...): The first time the user logs in a machine it creates a program data directory in user folder with the proper preconfigured settings.
• A distribution of popular free software clients for all these services.

Configured Applications

Here is a list of the applications included and automatically configured by Zentyal Desktop:

• Thunderbird (Mail service): The mail account of the user is read from LDAP and added.
• Ekiga (VoIP): The asterisk account for the user is added.
• Pidgin (Jabber service): The jabber account of the user (if it has one) is added.
• Firefox (Zarafa & User corner): Links to these two services are added to the bookmarks toolbar. Currently it only works if the user corner port is the default one (8888).

Required Scenario

• Zentyal Server 2.0.
• At least one client machine with either Windows XP or 7 installed.

Changes on Server Side to Make it Work

General Changes

• Make sure that you have the File Sharing module installed, if not you can install it by apt-get install ebox-samba or using the Software Management menu on the Zentyal interface.
• If you have the Firewall module enabled, go to Firewall --> Packet Filter --> Filtering rules from internal networks to Zentyal and change the decision for ldap service from DENY to ACCEPT.
• Set a valid shell like 'bash' in "Users and Groups -> LDAP Settings"
• The above change will only affect the users we create from now on.
• Enable Users and Groups Module and click on Save Changes.
• Create a user from the Users/Add? User menu on the Zentyal interface.
• FIXME: PDC configuration steps.

Jabber Service

• Make sure you have the SSL support option on the Zentyal Jabber configuration set to Allow SSL or Force SSL. That's because pidgin is configured by default to use SSL.
• Check the option Enable MUC (Multi User Chat) if you want to use conferences for the groups on your system.
• The Domain name must be set to the same value as your LDAP Base DN. You can check it at "Users and Groups -> LDAP Settings". For example, if your Base DN is "dc=example,dc=com" your Jabber Domain has to be "example.com". By default both LDAP Base DN and Jabber Domain has the same value (the hostname of your machine). So, if you haven't changed them, you don't have to do anything.

• The client needs also to be capable of resolve the Domain name to the Zentyal Server IP address. This won't be a problem if your clients get the DNS configuration from the Zentyal DHCP Server and you have added that domain.
• The users that you create must have enabled the Jabber Account section in the Users/Edit? User menu of Zentyal. You can see the image below.

Mail Service

• You need to have a virtual mail domain created (probably you already entered it in the initial configuration wizard).
• The users should have a mail account created (as shown in the last image of the Jabber service section).
• You can enable the mail retrieval services you want in the Mail/General? menu on Zentyal. But they have to be according to the Zentyal-Desktop\zentyal-desktop.ini in the "Program Files" directory.
• The default values on that file are to use IMAP instead of POP and use SSL when available.

Client Side (FIXME)

Installation:

• An executable Windows Installer is provided. Note that this is not yet a stable release, so you use it at your own risk.
• Login with an administrator account.
• Download the installer from:  http://zentyal.org/download/zentyal-desktop
• Launch installer
  • FIXME: screenshot
• Acept the terms
  • FIXME: screenshot
• The installer includes the following software, if you don't want to install any of it, just uncheck the option:
  • FIXME: screenshot
• At the end of the installation process you will be asked for the address of the Zentyal Server.
  • FIXME: screenshot
• Once the installation has finished, you can change this address at any moment at Start -> Programs -> Zentyal Desktop -> Zentyal Desktop (Configure)
• If the machine is not yet part of the Zentyal domain, you can join it now. You can find further information on how to do it at:  http://howtoforge.org/using-ebox-as-windows-primary-domain-controller-p3

Usage:

• Login into the domain with any user created in the Zentyal Server after the setup and check that the desktop programs are configured for the Zentyal Services.

• If you want to force a reconfiguration you can do it downloading and executing [FIXME this .reg file] and then login again.

Here is an example desktop after login and running pidgin. Pidgin asks directly for the password without needing to configure the account.

How it Works (FIXME)

• It uses pam_ldap.so PAM module (libpam-ldap package) for the remote authentication.
• The configuration of the user home directory is done by a script located at /usr/share/zentyal-desktop/zentyal-setup-user that is ran after login has succeeded.
• There is a /usr/share/zentyal-desktop/skel directory that contains templates for some of the configured applications.
• The zentyal-setup-user script gets different needed values from LDAP (connecting to the Zentyal server) and replaces them on the templates.
• It creates a .zentyal-desktop-configured file on the user home to avoid repeating the process after each login.
• zentyal-setup-user is ran (using pam_exec.so) as root user, so it adds some actions to the ~/.profile in order to be ran as the login user (some of them are other auxiliary scripts located in /usr/share/zentyal-desktop).