Re: System administration with GNOME.

["Gérard Milmeister" <gemi bluewin ch>]

I think that linuxconf is a bad program. It happens to work only if
your system is set up as one of the major distributions. As I use no
specific distribution, but install almost everything myself, I had
a hard time to get linuxconf to work. Moreover gnome-linuxconf doesn't
work with me. It seems to start up properly, but then no window pops up...

Gecco is worth considering as it supports plugins.

The best configuration tool I have seen is Webmin. It worked out of the
box, supports almost anything that is configurable and runs on almost
every Unix platform. Anyone who hasn't seen it should take a look at it.
http://www.webmin.com/webmin/
It has a web-based interface, which has the advantage that one can use
it to configure remotely, but can only use the limited set of HTML
GUI elements. Something like gnomin or gnomadmin, that has all 
Webmin' features would definitely great.

Some of the features include:
Bootup and shutdown, disk quotas, filesystems, manpages, nfs,
processes, cron, software packages (rpm), sysvinit, system logs,
user and groups, apache, bind, dhcp, ftp server, internet services,
majordomo, mysql, ppp, samba, sendmail, squid, ipchains, lilo, raid,
network config, partitions, printer, time...
There is even a file manager, telnet client, and file upload mechanism.
Modules can be uploaded and installed from within the browser. Webmin
uses Perl.

I would suggest a C core, with the possibility of writing modules (plugins)
in some scripting language. Personally I would prefer Python or Guile.
Honestly, Perl makes me shudder. (As a computer scientist, I consider
Perl a badly designed programming language.)

Regards,
-- 
Gérard Milmeister <gemi@bluewin.ch>
Tannenrauchstrasse 35
8038 Zürich
Switzerland

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