using Desktop Manager for managing Evolution Mail-Accounts

Hi,

To make a long story short, setting up Evolution accounts using the Desktop Manager is a bit inconvenient because of the way Evolution interacts with the Gnome Configuration system (GConf), which is what the Desktop Manager works with.

Basically, instead of using a group of GConf settings to configure an Evolution account, the application expects a single setting to contain an opaque (from GConf's point of view) XML string describing the account data. You can look at what these strings look like by running, as a user who has an account configured, the command: gconftool-2 -g /apps/evolution/mail/accounts

The Desktop Manager allows the administrator to set the value of GConf settings, and so the "Accounts List" field represents that accounts list key (/apps/evolution/mail/accounts), each item of which is one of these XML strings. This in turn means that if you want to set the account data, you need to add into this list (using the New button) the whole XML definition of that account as one large string.

Regarding your second question, the Desktop Manager offers the possibility to use the LDAP attributes of the user entry to dynamically expand specific placeholders in the profiles' configuration settings for Gnome applications, provided you're using an LDAP directory to provide the information about user and organisations to the Desktop Manager. If you're using such a setup, I can provide more information on how to use these placeholders.

Regards,

Cyrille

cyrillem at 2007-7-6 22:28:43 >

Hi Joerg,

The documentation for the Desktop Manager focuses on the common parts of the operation of the product, the details of the meaning of each setting are more related to the application to which they belong, which is why they don't feature in the general administration manual. You can, however, find more contextual information about the various pages of the Desktop Manager by clicking on the "More" button present on each of these pages, for instance in the case of the Evolution accounts, this would have told you about the fact that the Accounts field is a list of strings containing the XML account description (though I'll grant you that in this particular case, it's a bit on the terse side).

As for the placeholders, you need to update your Sun Ray server with patch 120454 (120455 depending on your platform) revision 02, so that the GConf adapter which integrates Desktop Manager data into the Gnome configuration handles the placeholder properly. Then you have the possibility of using the special strings "[apoc.<attribute>]" in the configuration settings, which will be replaced when evaluated with the value of <attribute> in the LDAP user entry.

As an example (which you should adapt to the contents of your LDAP server and the actual definition you want to use for your Evolution accounts), you could for instance use the following XML blob for an Evolution account (I've formated it nicely for display purposes, you will want to paste as a single line into that Accounts list):

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<account name="[apoc.mail]" uid="[apoc.uid]" enabled="true">

<identity>

<name>[apoc.cn]</name>

<addr-spec>[apoc.mail]</addr-spec>

<reply-to></reply-to>

<organization></organization>

<signature auto="false" default="-1"/>

</identity>

<source save-passwd="false" keep-on-server="false" auto-check="true" auto-check-timeout="10"/>

<transport save-passwd="false">

<url>smtp://[apoc.givenname].[apoc.sn]@[apoc.mailhost]</url>

</transport>

<drafts-folder>file:///home/[apoc.uid]/evolution/local/Drafts</drafts-folder>

<sent-folder>file:///home/[apoc.uid]/evolution/local/Sent</sent-folder>

<auto-cc always="false">

<recipients></recipients>

</auto-cc>

<auto-bcc always="false">

<recipients></recipients>

</auto-bcc>

<pgp encrypt-to-self="false" always-trust="false" always-sign="false" no-imip-sign="false">

<key-id></key-id>

</pgp>

<smime encrypt-to-self="false" always-sign="false"/>

</account>

Now to go back to your problem with getting the profiles you've assigned with the Desktop Manager visible on the user's desktop, I can first offer a few remarks on your configuration:

- you've specified a DN and password for authentication to your LDAP server, I would like to point out that the agent (as opposed to the Desktop Manager itself) will only ever perform read accesses to your LDAP server (to find the user entry, figure out its position in the hierarchy and retrieve the applicable profiles), so you don't need to provide a user with write access, let alone administrative priviledges, as you seem to have done. If your LDAP server setup supports anonymous read access, I would advise you to leave these fields blank in the agent configuration;

- you've set the ChangeDetectInterval, DaemonChangeDetectInterval, TimeToLive and GarbageCollectionInterval to 1 (minute), which is unnecessary and for some of them probably detrimental to the performance of the agent operation. I can expand if you wish on the meaning of each of these (though I think that's described in the manuals), but I would advise you put back the default values for all of these settings, except maybe the ChangeDetectInterval while you're testing the product (this is the setting used to determine how often the user data is refreshed, i.e how often the changes from the Desktop Manager are propagated to the desktop applications, one minute is fine for testing purposes but you should put it back to its sixty minutes default once the profiles are fairly stable in order to minimise the activity of the agent).

Please first try and make the above changes to the agent configuration, and check whether the problem you're having is still present. If so, we can look into other potential causes for the problem.

Regards,

Cyrille

cyrillem at 2007-7-6 22:28:43 >

I'm glad to hear it's now working, the placeholder feature is implemented in the client components of the Desktop Manager, which are part of Solaris 10, so, provided you've installed the necessary patches (or a Solaris 10 update including them), the mechanism will work similarly on any Solaris 10 machine.

Regards,

Cyrille

cyrillem at 2007-7-6 22:28:43 >