‘Designed to handle tens of thousands of workstations’

The government of Spain’s Andalusia has revamped its free and open source desktop, aimed to become the region’s standard configuration for workstations and laptops. The overhaul focussed on IT management, system integration, support and system scalability. The new standard corporate desktop, GECOS - Guadalinex Escritorio COrporativo eStandar, is designed to handle tens of thousands of workstations.

The main aim of the GECOS desktop installation management software, is to make the GECOS desktop the government standard, says Juan Conde, who works at the free software promotion project of the Andalusian Ministry of Finance and Public Administration.

With the first version of GECOS, presented in 2012, Andalusia tested the limits of a centrally managed Linux desktop infrastructure. It worked fine for dozens of computers, however the management tools did not scale up to hundreds or thousands of PCs. “The second version of GECOS should be able to handle tens of thousands of workstations”, says Conde. GECOS is still in its pilot phase, he adds. After that, the project will first be used to manage some 2000 workstations.

The GECOS desktop workstations are based on Ubuntu 14.04 and LinuxMint 17.

Humongous

The GECOS team improved management tools and introduced new IT management solutions. GECOS now organises the hierarchies of workstations, printers and storage devices and allows for administration of PC users, groups of users, and software applications. “We have solutions to manage organisational units, to implement hierarchies of groups and users, and can manage non-hierarchical relationships”, says Conde. “We include queueing systems, to handle operations with a major impact, such as implementing new and complex policies, or rules that affect thousands of workstations or users.”

The management tools built into GECOS are well-tested in large scale data centre operations, says Conde. The main management tool is Chef, which is also used by a well-known Internet retailer. “We built the management web-interfaces using Java script libraries such as Backbone.js and Marionette.js”, says Conde. “We use these interfaces to manage hierarchies, storing all configurations and tasks in database system MongoDB.”

“This set-up allows us to keep separate workstations and management tools”, he says. “That should make it easier to change, if better options are available.”

GECOS is developed as open source, emphasises Conde. “It’s obvious, perhaps, but we really welcome input from users, developers, translators, from public administrations, citizens and companies.”

An upward trend

The development of GECOS predates the 2013 resolution adopted by the Andalusia parliament. The resolutions urges the region to switch to free and open source.

The Junta de Andalucía will continue to support the closely-related Guadalinex open source desktop distribution, which is intended to be used by citizens and in schools. In the autonomous region, some 400,000 school laptops are running Guadalinex.

More information:

Presentation on GECOS

GECOS