OpenCLAWS Handbook

First of all, welcome to OpenCLAWS! You are about to embark on a journey to greatly simplify the management of your organization's central IT infrastructure. OpenCLAWS is all about simplicity. While installing OpenCLAWS, options are always made clear to you. And if you follow this handbook to a "T", you should be up and running quickly.

OpenCLAWS is a powerful, modular software system that provides centralized account, identity, and computer management in a heterogenous computing environment. Its design is clean and flexible, and can integrate with nearly any system your organization supports.

Step-By-Step Installation

This handbook is divided into chapters that will guide you through the installation process. We've worked very hard to make the installation fast and simple. If you feel that any aspect of this handbook or the process could use revision, then please submit a bug ticket.

OpenCLAWS installation can be divided into the following major steps:

• Prepare your organization's infrastructure
• Install the OpenCLAWS central server
• Install remote service modules
• Test your installation thoroughly
• Take a nap (you deserve it)

When you are given a certain choice, we try our best to explain what the pros and cons are. We will continue then with a default choice, identified by "Default:" in the title. The other possibilities are marked by "Alternative:". Do not think that the default is what we recommend. It is, however, what we believe most users will use.

Sometimes you can pursue an optional step. Such steps are marked as "Optional:" and are therefore not needed to install OpenCLAWS. However, some optional steps are dependent on a previous decision you made. We will inform you when this happens, both when you make the decision, and right before the optional step is described.

Operations and Maintenance

Once OpenCLAWS is installed and configured properly, you will need to teach your IT support staff how to use this new management tool. There may also come a time when you need to change your OpenCLAWS configuration to support new systems or technologies. The OpenCLAWS Handbook contains reference chapters for this purpose. We strongly recommend that you read though these documents to familiarize yourself with OpenCLAWS operations.

You will read more about this topic at the end of the installation process.

Troubles?

If you find a problem in the installation (or in the installation documentation), please visit our bug tracking system and check if the bug is known. If not, please create a bug ticket for it so we can take care of it.

Note that, although your organization's environment is awesome, this handbook will contain references to software systems that you may not be supporting. This is due to the fact that OpenCLAWS is capable of working with many different systems, and we can't possibly know your needs. We will try to keep this to a minimum to avoid confusion.

If you are uncertain if the problem is a user problem (some error you made despite having read the documentation carefully) or a software problem (some error we made despite having tested the installation/documentation carefully), you are free to post to the user discussion list at openclaws-users@….

Ready, Set, Go!

Are you ready to dive in? Great! Start by preparing your environment.