Vitalnix User Management Suite

This is a collection of programs for managing Linux users and groups in a multitude of databases. Using a plugin architecture, different storage methods can be interfaced with; currently there is support for Shadow, LDAP and MySQL.

The suite comes with useradd(8)-like command-line programs for single operations, programs for synchronization against another data source such as plain text files, web interface scripts, login restriction plugins, and print accounting.

Vitalnix provides a library, _libvxdb, which encapsulates away the underlying storage mechanism and provides generalized methods of basic operations such as “add a user”, modify, delete. With regard to user/group information retrieval, it is mostly equivalent to NSS, but is thread-safe and multi-use safe.

Vitalnix is not the solution to everything. It does not allow you to add arbitrary attributes to a user account, even if the underlying storage mechanisms could be adopted to do so.

Of course, there is a bit more than just libvxdb. SAMBA Logon Time Restriction and Print Accounting are two parts for example, which are not directly related to user management, but they were nonetheless needed.