Alan's Blog

« Previous month (Jul 2009) | Main | Next month (Sep 2009) »
Tuesday Aug 25, 2009

Using Computer Management (MMC) with the Solaris CIFS Service

One of our goals for the Solaris CIFS Service is to provide seamless Windows interoperability: not just to deliver ubiquitous, multi-protocol file sharing, which is obviously a major part of this project, but to support Windows services at a fundamental level.  It's an ongoing mission and our latest update includes support for Windows remote management.

Remote management is extremely important to Windows administrators and one of the mainstay tools is Computer Management. Computer Management is a Windows administration application, actually a collection of Microsoft Management Console (MMC) tools, that can be used to configure, monitor and manage local and remote services and resources.  The MMC is an extensible framework of registered components, known as snap-ins, which allows Computer Management to provide comprehensive management features for both the local system and remote systems on the network.

Supported Computer Management features include:

  • Share Management

    Support for share management is relatively complete.  You can create, delete, list and configure shares.  It's not yet possible to change the maximum allowed or number of users properties but other properties, including the Share Permissions, can be managed via the MMC.

    Managing shares using Computer Management


  • Users, Groups and Connections

    You can view local SMB users and groups, monitor user connections and see the list of open files. If necessary, you can also disconnect users and/or close files.

    Viewing local users and groups using Computer Management

  • Services

    You can view the SMF services running on an OpenSolaris system.  This is a read-only view - we don't support service management (the ability to start or stop) SMF services from Computer Management (yet).

    Viewing SMF services using Computer Management

To ensure that only the appropriate users have access to administrative operations there are some access restrictions on these remote management features.

  • Regular users can:
    • List shares

  • Only members of the Administrators or Power Users groups can:
    • Manage shares
    • List connections

  • Only members of the Administrators group can:
    • List open files and close files
    • Disconnect users
    • View SMF services
    • View the EventLog

Here's a screenshot when I was using Computer Management and Server Manager (another Windows remote management application) on Windows XP to view some open files on an OpenSolaris system to prepare a slide presentation on MMC support.

Computer Management and Server Manager

Posted at 02:46AM Aug 25, 2009 by Alan Wright in Sun  |  Comments[1]