Wednesday, Wednesday, January 02, 2002, 6:02:39 PM, Biz-Ops - OpenSRS wrote:
> I'm aware of all of that, and you are correct. I meant to refer to a > management system. I have already been through SourceForge, and nothing > their seems to be of interest. I have been offered deals with many > "Commercial" companies like cPanel, but their software takes complete > control and I think that is going to interfere with a number of my services > I have installed on my server to date. I may just manually setup all the > accounts, just in hopes of a package to help simplify things. I have already > gotten some "Really" good offers on eLance for making a system. Only problem > is, I don't feel much like using my server as a test dummy with my active > sites so that is why I am leaning to continue using WebMin..... ;) This kind of thing almost always requires something custom to the way you run your business. Like you said, you have some other services you do, and so most of the canned packages would greatly intefere with that. Learn perl or php pretty well, and mysql. I can recommend a good course of books for all three if you want some recommendations in that regard that I've used and seen others use to get to where doing personal tools for things like this becomes much easier. For instance, I keep all the dns and virtual server info in a mysql database, and wrote a php front end for managing the data. I then have a perl script that runs via cron and it checks to see if any changes were made to the virtual server setups, if not it goes on to the dns subrouting, if changes were made it regenerates the apache and configs and does a graceful restart of apache (which doesn't hard cut off existing processes/accesses). I'm using Exim as the mail server, and it has mysql integration, so changes made to the email system are already setup to be instant, so I don't need to do anything with that config normally. Once it gets past the apache routines, it then goes on to see if any of the dns zones need to be updated, and only creates new zones for ones that have changes, and then does an reload of bind. But these tools are highly unique to my own setup, and my own style of doing things. And I'd bet that is probably the norm out there for most hosting providers. They either do it themselves, or they hire someone to do specifically what they want. --wxw
