29 Mar 09 Admin Management System

RE my last post An idea – cPanel like host management – I’ve had some interesting comments emailed to me. I am aware of the various options out there, but I find that they don’t quite address what I’m trying to do here and are also usually either very feature lacking, buggy, and not really for production or too expensive.

I suppose what I’m trying to do here is create a management interface for system administrators like myself. I’m not sure that this is intended towards the general internet user that needs a cPanel like type interface, with big buttons and lots of help pointers and explainations. As much as I reluctantly praised cPanel in my previous post, I have a hard time handing my entire system over to the cPanel software, knowing I can’t do what I want with it anymore. On our current internal managed systems, I’ve created a primative MySQL based system whereby all domain, and mail data is stored in the database and pulled out via shell scripts on a cron job which update the relevant configs. This is far from ideal and needs rewriting.

Before this system, to add a site, I need to edit named.conf on both my primary and secondary DNS, and create a zone file which I just clone from a standard template. Then I add the domain to the mail domains database, and add users and forwards to the relevant tables as appropriate. Then I need to add an entry to apache’s config, create a web directory and set up a user account with no shell and FTP only, set permissions, then HUP apache, exim and bind.

Removing a domain involves reversing that same process. This is time consuming, and generally quite annoying.

I want a very very light management system/web interface. Powerful and feature rich but something that will not hijack my system. Something modular, clean and simple in design, and most importantly, something that works on Debian!

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