InterStructures Management Tool Makes Windows
Do Linux

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you come from a Unix heritage, making the jump to Linux is not perfectly transparent, but it is like moving from the United States to, say, Canada. Everything is a bit more open, but everyone drives on the same side of the road, most people speak the same language, they have essentially the same culture (Canadians have some French culture thrown in and are more open about certain things), and so forth. Moving from Windows to Linux is another thing entirely. Like moving from the United States to, say, Japan. There is a lot of change to absorb in such a move.

And it is not just the end users who are affected by the radically different technology embodied in Linux and Windows, which are functionally equivalent yet absolutely feature incompatible. Linux is taking off more slowly on desktops because of the radical difference in software between Linux and the desktop behemoth, Windows. But even on servers, there are issues--big issues. Even in commercial settings where the end users would be oblivious to what platform is behind their Web applications--can you tell what server is hosting a site or an internal Web application by looking at the browser Windows? The people who keep the server infrastructure humming are by and large in two camps, the Unix/Linux camp and the Windows camp. They have different skills when it comes to server administration and, often, different ways of architecting applications. And that is a problem for commercial Linux suppliers if they want Linux to be not just competitive with Windows, but usable by Windows shops who have very little or no idea what Linux is all about.

Enter New York-based QCD Microsystems and its InterStructures system administration tools for Linux. InterStructures is a set of tools that plug right into the Microsoft Management Console user interface at the heart of Windows. By plugging Linux into the MMC, InterStructures allows Windows administrators to manage Windows and core Linux servers through that single MMC interface. Basically, it makes Windows do Linux, or visa versa depending on how you want to look at it. Whatever the metaphor is you want to choose, the idea, according to David Finkelstein, vice president of sales and marketing at QCD Microsystems, is the same: If you know Windows management, you can use that skill to manage key programs that are available on Linux. "While there are big benefits to Linux in terms of security," says Finkelstein, "the Windows user interface is pretty easy to use."

QCD Microsystems was founded in New York in 2000 by Aditya Narayan, who set up a research lab in Calcutta, India, where QCD still does its software development today with a team of nine programmers. InterStructures Release 1.0 was announced in the fall of 2004, and in April the company hired Finkelstein to ramp up its sales and marketing efforts from New York. He was previously vice president of sales and marketing at desktop Linux distributor Xandros, which had a similar mission in that Xandros was attempting to make desktop Linux look and feel like Microsoft's Windows XP operating system (as much as is practical given the very different code and system structure that goes into both platforms).

While Linux has well-established command line interfaces, which many Unix nerds still prefer, Windows administrators have long since become accustomed to being able to do something with a few mouse clicks. So Linux can be something of a shock. By using a clone of the Windows MMC, InterStructures allows Linux-based Samba print and file servers, DHCP, Apache Web, and Squid Web proxy servers to be managed from the InterStructures GUI and, more importantly, integrated into existing Windows-based Active Directory networks. To set up the Samba server on a Linux box (and either replace or augment an existing Windows-based print and file server), the Samba PDC module of InterStructures allows you to create a Samba server, link it into an Active Directory domain, and define network shares from a GUI. This is the code that started shipping last fall. The proxy server module shipped in January of this year, and it enables Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality and server access control for Linux-based servers that are members of an Active Directory network. The DCHP module of InterStructures shipped in February, and it allows admins to create a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol server running on a Linux box (which resolves IP addresses within the network) in a manner very similar to that used in Windows. In late May, QCD Microsystems shipped its HTTP Server module, which has an administration front end that is made to look and feel like the administration features of Microsoft's own Internet Information Services (ISS) Web server, even though what admins are really setting up and administering is an Apache Web server. This module works with both Apache 1.X and 2.X servers. Finkelstein says that QCD Microsystems is still working on modules to bring Windows-like management of Domain Name Servers (DNS) and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers running on Linux to the InterStructures tools.

InterStructures requires a small software agent to run on each Linux box, and importantly, log files from Linux and Windows servers can be consolidated into a single Windows event viewer. InterStructures also includes a Windows-based management console that can run on Windows 2000 or Windows XP desktops, and importantly, this console can be used to manage both Linux and Windows servers. Also important is the fact that InterStructures can manage the services embodied in the InterStructures tool on either Red Hat Enterprise Linux Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server distributions; custom Linux distributions can also be supported.

The full InterStructures tool suite costs $1,499 for managing up to 10 servers. If all you want is the Samba management tools, you can get those for $599 for the same 10 server license. If you want to have that Samba server be an Active Directory member (rather than a primary domain controller) you can get the tool for $100 per server. QCD Microsystems offers a free download of the tools on its site if you want to give it a spin.