Toska

A new version (0.8.beta), fixing a nasty bug in Mac OS X popup menus, together with lots of bugfixes and usability enhancements is available in the download area or for Java Web Start users. Enjoy!

This small project aims to itch an annoying scratch in a network administrator life. When you manage a lot of system administrators and developers who need access to various accounts (typically "root", "apache", "oracle" and so on) to different machines, you want to keep it as secure as possible.

One possible solution is to use SSH to manage the access to the machines, but you might not want to give away the real user passwords, since this turns into a bigger security problem. So you switch to key-based authorization, enabling each user's own key to the various accounts on the various machines.

This turns soon into an administration nightmare: keeping track of users, external consultants, people that changes role (and access rights), people that joins the company or leaves it, different project needs: a true PITA where you spend your time hand-editing authorized_keys files.

This is why Toska was born. I badly needed a tool that allows me and my co-workers to manage in a somehow centralized way the key management stuff. I wanted to see if I was able to do some GUI programming. I wanted to check if GUI programming with Avalon was feasible. I had (a few) spare time. So this is it!

The idea is pretty naive, and the implementation is rough, but, hey, at least this is something. Basically what you have is a database of keys and hosts. Each host has a database of users, and each user can have one or more keys associated to it. You can change the setup on the fly, adding or removing keys, adding or removing hosts and users, enabling or disabling keys should you need it (think about a user going on vacation: you can disable her key for the time being and it will take just a mouse click when she returns).

All this comes at a price, of course. :-) What you have, after operating on Toska, is just a directory tree filled up with user files: you will still have to move manually the generated authorized_keys to the destination machines. But the directory tree is designed so that it should be a matter of minutes to automate this process too (it's already in the TODO list for that matter, but contributions are welcome).

Well, this is free software, so standard disclaimer apply. In addition to that, keep in mind that I consider myself a half-decent server side developer: this is my first attempt in GUIs, so don't expect too much in terms of usability, performance and so on.

However, I did my best to make this tool as flexible and easy as possible. If you have Java Web Start installed, all you need is click here to install it. The architecture too is somewhat extensible, since it's based on the great Avalon framework.

This said, have fun with Toska. As with every Open Source project, contributions and feedback are more than welcome!