Simplifying server and system administration
Core-Admin provides a software solution to connect all your servers and systems using an agent software (the Core-Admin Agent). Once these connections are established, based on BEEP protocol (http://www.beepcore.org), the Core-Admin server is able to let Core-Admin clients to invoke services available at Core-Admin agents.
Core-Admin provides a platform that connects your servers and systems together to a central server that makes them available to authorized users with a single credential.
This provides many advantages over traditional tools beacuse:
- You don’t need to have one panel for every machine.
- As a consequence, you don’t need to have several users on every platform which becomes a nightmare when you want to update or remove users from these servers.
BEEP protocol for the server-to-agent and client-to-server connection
Taking advantage of the BEEP protocol (http://www.beepcore.org), the core-admin agent connects to the central server, creating this way a BEEP session that is used by the central server to create independent channels that are used to invoke services and/or to notify events found by agents.
This allows agents to provide access to Core-Admin users, through the central server, without having to expose an open port running a with a high user permission.
At the same time, Core-Admin web clients uses a single BEEP connection (BEEP or BEEP over WebSocket) to the server over which independent channels are created to interact with several end point servers at the same time.
Because Core-Admin doesn’t need to create a complete connection for every operation but reuse parallel channels over a single BEEP session (connection), it makes it really efficient, allowing the server to handle hundred of servers with unexpensive hardware.
Centralized design to do interesting things
Due to Core-Admin’s design, it is possible to simplify operations and to take advantage of your servers. For example, it is really easy to:
- Add/remove users from the whole system or to track their operations in a centralized manner.
- It is possible to let current users to have access to resources on different machines with an unified view. For example, as new mail servers are added to your Core-Admin, more mail server domains can be created on them and letting current users to handle them (without taking into account their location).
ASPL Open Source components used by Core-Admin
The following tools, libraries and products are licensed under OpenSource licenses and were used to develop Core-Admin. The following list is software developed by ASPL:
Vortex Library
At the core of Core-Admin we find Vortex Library, our open source implementation of the BEEP protocol. It provides highly interactive, bidirectional and parallel communications to Core-Admin with channels support, SASL authentication and TLS session security.
Turbulence server
The BEEP server built on top of Vortex Library is used to implement the Core-Admin central server. It provides lots of ready to use server side features to deploy and configure BEEP applications.
jsVortex
Our Javascript BEEP implementation with support for WebSocket allows us to convert any browser into an effective BEEP client easily.
Axl Library
Our open source implementation of the XML 1.0 standard features a really fast processing and low memory footprint. We are using Axl Library to manage many configuration aspects throughout the platform.
noPoll toolkit
Our open source WebSocket implementation allows easy integration into existing projects. We are using it to provide WebSocket support to Turbulence, so it can be reached using BEEP and BEEP over WebSocket.
ext-Dns Toolkit
The ext-Dns is a really useful tool to easily create DNS servers that performs custom actions at resolution level. It is used by our Internet Access Manager (IAM).
Other open source projects used by Core-Admin
Where to start? There are many projects on top of which Core-Admin it is built that it is not possible to mention of all them. In this case, here are the most relevant ones and those which are used directly by Core-Admin.
The dojotoolkit: professional RIA toolkit
Dojotoolkit (http://www.dojotoolkit.org) is a professional Javascript library that will allow you to create highly interactive internet applications. Core-Admin is using it to create the web-client interface. You can see it working on the following section: Core-Admin in action.
The python language: powerful scripting
Python has been used as primary language for the Core-Admin central server and all code that runs at the Core-Admin agent. It has provided as the power and flexibility we needed to quickly develop a serious and commercial grade product. See more details about Python at: http://www.python.org