EnlightenDSM -- Distributed Systems Management

Marcel Gagné

The day-to-day demands on an average systems administrator are many. Printer problems alone can add up to a quarter of administration time. Add to that user creation, network management, security...well, you get the idea. Now, toss in today's enterprise-wide, multi-platform environment. Take a handful of NT servers, a large scale HP-UX system, a couple of IBM RISC 6000s, a couple hundred Windows 95 workstations, a Linux firewall, and a SCO print server -- and you have the makings of a real pressure cooker of a job. Now, spread this out over several cities from one end of the country to the other, and things really get interesting.

Anything that promises to streamline that process is going to catch your attention. If that something also promises management of this distributed and varied environment through a single, friendly, graphical user interface, it demands even closer examination.

Enter Enlighten Software Solutions' Distributed Systems Manager or EnlightenDSM. This product makes it possible to manage users, printers, disk space, security, and a host of administration functions from a single X Window console. I took EnlightenDSM on a test drive across just such a mixed environment. In this article, I will tell you what I found.

Installation

While performing this review, I had the opportunity to work with two different versions of EnlightenDSM.