Overview

DTS Systeme GmbH has been providing complete IT Services to the German market since 1993. DTS Systeme GmbH Started as a HP reseller and today, it offers a range of products and services on top of that including:

• 24/7 Helpdesk
• Datacenter Services
• Network Infrastructure Products from HP, Juniper and Foundry
• Microsoft Software Products and Consulting
• Unix Operating System Knowhow incl. Linux and BSD
• Internet Provider Services
• IT Security Reselling and Consulting including products from Checkpoint, Juniper, McAfee, and Kaspersky

Although DTS Systeme GmbH is not a software development company, the wide range of its products and services and the fact that the company also operates as an ISP with a massive usage of a datacenter often results in requests for customized tools and solutions.

Business needs
The company needed to develop a solution which would operate as an OS Deployment tool that is customized for the needs of their Datacenter according the specific design parameters given.

All servers were required to be modified to use configurations saved as files on the Database when needed or instructed. While the system can manage using console applications it was decided to provide the solution as a Web Interface. This Web UI would allow access to Datacenter personnel without Linux knowledge and enable them to perform needed operations.

The solution should also be consisted of Linux Open-Source components in the main part and based on a Centos 5 amd64 OS with modified components like DHCP Server, TFTP Server, Samba and a Postgresql Database.

Deploying PXEControl in a very short period of time was a major requirement, so it was extremely necessary to use a solution that would provide an easy and fast development process as well as simple deployment.

The Solution
The team decided not to use PHP but to use Mono (mod_mono) with Visual WebGui because of the short timeframe they had for deploying the solution and since Visual WebGui provided the easiest and quickest graphical development possible.

Building the PXEControl as a web-based GUI with a database driven back end allowed them to control TFTP / DHCP and other components through a database with triggers.

The development process was straight forward. While the final goal was well defined, some of the concepts and functions were being defined while coding the solution. Visual WebGui's unique approach enabling easy integration of UserControls and intuitive graphical development allowed for this unstructured development cycle which led to an extremely shortened process, as stated by Axel Westerhold: "Because of the easy graphical development environment and the integration into Visual Studio we were able to roll out the product within 2 weeks."

Benefits
Using Visual WebGui for PXEControl allowed DTS Systeme GmbH to provide its administrators with tools that can run either in IE (for windows users) and Firefox (for windows and Unix) with no adjustments required. In addition, they could also run on different operating systems such as Windows and Linux servers without the long and difficult process of porting the application onto different platforms.

"In the past we were using .NET Applications with GUI components which were difficult to port to the Mac and Linux OS. As Unix Systems are common in Datacenter and ISP environments we lost much time finding incompatibilities in Mono's WinForms implementation," said Westerhold.

Overall, Visual WebGui not only contributed to the successful achievement of hose technical requirements, but also allowed DTS Systeme to achieve them in an amazingly short development & deployment period of only 2 weeks.

Screen shots
This is the main PxeControl Windows allowing for Operating System Selection:

This is the windows the user gets after selecting Windows OS:

Selecting Centos will show this windows:

On this screen the network settings for a new Linux System is defined:

This is the FreeBSD Packet Selection:

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