Ibex design: user switching, presence and session termination (Here Be Dragons)

I really enjoy using Ubuntu, but I do wish they would spend a little more effort on enterprise readiness. By this I mean in particular, thinking about enterprise capabilities like NIS, enterprise DHCP features like configuring NTP servers and NIS servers, etc. Most every shop that has lots of UNIX systems around still uses NIS at least for user/group login information, and very often for other critical infrastructure like automount maps, etc. Ubuntu is simply broken in these environments: it doesn't configure NTP or NIS servers based on the appropriate options in DHCP response packets. It doesn't properly handle automount maps configured in NIS (it starts automount before NIS is up, so it looks like there are no maps). I filed bugs about these issues at least early in Hardy, if not back in Gutsy.

And, having just upgraded to Intrepid I see a new problem: the user switcher shows ALL the users it can find, not just the local users; when I click on the switcher I get an absolutely ridiculously huge window, taking up my entire screen, containing every user that appears in my NIS passwd database. Really quite unusable. I found a bug about this that was filed in mid-August and still is marked "New" with no comments added.

After seeing how easy it is to keep their systems up-to-date with Ubuntu a number of my co-workers have switched, but I can't in good conscience recommend a wider audience for Ubuntu until these enterprise issues are addressed. It would be nice if there were a real push in that direction for Ibex.