[Server-devel] Web-based Management Interface for the XS

[Bryan Berry]

Martin, have you also looked at http://ebox-platform.com/ ? I have
downloaded and intend to play w/ it today. From the screenshots and
reviews looks quite nice. From what I can tell it is specific to Debian.

If you do intend to build a web-based interface from scratch, can you
use a pretty language like Python or Ruby to do it? Perl and PHP make my
eyes bleed. Both Django (Python) and Ruby on Rails seem like great
frameworks for rapid development.

I also like RubyonRails because there is momentum in the FedoraCommons
community (E-Library) toward using Rails apps for front-end services.
Then I could reuse the skills I have yet to acquire!


On Wed, 2008-03-19 at 07:33 -0400, Martin Langhoff wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 12:17 AM, John Watlington <wad at laptop.org> wrote:
> >  > In the long term, there appears to be concern that the existing
> >  > administration interfaces for servers are not sufficient for our
> >  > needs.
> >  > I personally not worked w/ webmin or the admin interface for Centos
> >  > SME
> >  > Server so I cannot comment from experience.
> >
> >  I've worked with Webmin, and the user experience is tolerable.
> >  Our security architect (Ivan) had less than noble things to say about
> >  it's implementation, dissuading us from using it.
> 
> Here I am with Ivan - Webmin is the spawn of the devil ;-) - but
> beyond that, I've seen quite a few web admin UIs, and though some are
> good, none are what we are after IMHO. A custom web-based admin UI
> might be something we have to write custom for the XS (*rolls up
> sleeves*). I am hope we can discuss and sketch some plans for this in
> the coming days...
> 
> >  I've slowly added scripts automating most of the configuration for
> >  small systems.   We are really close to providing a file either on
> >  disk or on USB which configures the system  --- it is a trivial
> >  programming
> >  task once the user experience and configuration info have been
> >  agreed upon.
> 
> Cool - I'll be looking into those...
> 
> >  Larger systems (NYC, Birmingham) are a different
> >  story, as their network configuration is radically different.  We will
> >  probably fork builds to handle their case, or move to just supporting
> >  service packages.
> 
> Can we encapsulate local config in a "local" rpm package with fancy
> post-inst scripts?
> 
> cheers,
> 
> 
> 
> martin