All the essential parts of PNS configuration have a corresponding custom configuration component in MC. For custom, auxiliary services that are not part of the default PNS configuration but installed separately, for example, a Snort Intrusion Detection System (IDS) service, MC provides a generic tool, the Text editor plugin configuration component to edit text-based configuration files. Since practically all Unix services work with text-based configuration files, the Text editor plugin can be used to configure all of them remotely.

Although the Text editor plugin provides only a simple text editor functionality, if you use this tool to configure the custom services, they are placed under the control of MS. From MC, the configuration changes are first committed to the MS server and stored there. After an upload command, these configurations are handled by the zms-transfer-agent on the corresponding PNS firewall. So any service installed on the PNS host are, in effect, MS-managed.

The number of Text editor plugins is not limited, you can add as many of them as needed. Furthermore, a single plugin can be used to edit more than a single text file.