Good OSS Control Panel ala CPanel ...

[Mark Bucciarelli]

On Fri, Nov 03, 2006 at 04:17:17PM -0400, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> 
> Does one exist, plain and simple?
> 

There's a gaggle of them: gplhost, ispconfig, webmin (?), etc.

I haven't found one I liked.  Mainly because none do a good job
of managing multiple services on multiple servers.  Also, some
config options are stored in text files not a db.  That's another
area I found lacking.  Finally, I use the Courier MTA, not
postfix.  Most free software panels assume Postfix.  Finally, I'm
a little paranoid about security.

So I'm writing one [1].  My approach is to use key-based SSH to
talk to other servers.  I may even write a special shell to
further restrict what the panel user can do (ala git-shell) on
the remote box.  The fascgi panel app runs in a chroot jail.  

Using C and multi-threaded fastcgi (mainly for fun, I know it's
overkill--cgi would probably work just fine).  I'm hoping to do
very little templating/layout on the server and stuff the UI into
javascript.  Haven't got that far yet.

Most of customers want logs and email mods.  Phpmyadmin does a
fine job of satisfying the demand for db gui (seems like that's
what everyone expects anyway).  What tasks do your users want?

By the way, given how much free software ISP's use, it's
surprising to me there's not a good free panel yet.

m

[1] http://freedom.gaiahost.coop/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=panel;a=summary