Date: Wed, 28 Jan 98 14:03:00 PST From: Adam Turoff <AdamT@smginc.com> To: Karl Pielorz <kpielorz@tdx.co.uk> Cc: hackers <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: WebAdmin (was: RE: /usr/src/release/sysinstall needs YOU. :-)) Message-ID: <34D0FC18@smginc.com>
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Karl writes: >Hmmm... > > I don't often throw my 2 pennies worth in, but here goes... > > The company where I'm working now have several FreeBSD machines, and 1 > competent BSD 'maintainer' (guess who?). OK. Time for a roll call. How many other people resemble this description? :-) :-) If I haven't said it before, I'd like to thank all of the hackers that came before me that worked on FreeBSD. My life would be an NT Admin Hell otherwise. >[karl's admind] > > A lot of this is based on SMTP / POP3 conversation style stuff, e.g. you might > send a command to that port to 'ADDUSER "username", "password", "group", > "homedir", "shell"' etc. - the box then goes off and does this - tells you > whether it could or couldn't etc, likewise a 'LISTSMTPVIRTUALDOMAIN' command > will return a nice list of all the SMTP Virtual domains the server supports, > which again can be read and displayed by the client... > > I know this solution isn't perfect, but it's not doing too bad so far... We > have Win 32 clients (written in VB) which connect to it at the moment, though > there's no reason why these couldn't be Java clients. > > The client is 'dumb', all it has to do is prompt for the right information - > make sure it's sensible - then submit it to the server to have it carried out. > Any errors are returned as text, or error codes - which the client can display > to the user. > > Right - that's the 'rough' outline, please flame away... Seems reasonable. I'm a bit of a protocol bigot, though. With so many standards out there, why create a new one? Hesitance towards a CGI based approach, even if it's running on an obscure SSL port is well founded. I agree that it's senseless to do something that's not open and extensible. Just because I happen to have an anti-Java bias doesn't mean that there are sufficiently many hackers out there who want to make java admin clients or whatever. CGI is just a simple matter of programming. How about using a framework that can use CGI but can also run standalone or off of an admind interface to the same scripts? It's all about sending the correct name/value pairs to the correct script and waiting for your box to automagically reconfigure itself. Sound reasonable? Lynx/Netscape/Daemonscape can use it if you're so inclined to run a httpd-type interface, and some sort of perl/tcl/python/java/vb standalone client or admind client should hit everyone's wishlist. Now it comes down to a simple matter of programming in everyone's copious free time.... -- Adam.
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