Web-based business server

[Edward Murrell]

To be brutally honest, if you're going to do something like this, MySQL
auth is not the way to go. You're going to want LDAP - especially if you
want to start doing things like attaching Windows and Mac computers in a
domain type fashion.

Ideally, you'd probably want to run Kerberos for authentication, and
hang DHCP and DNS configuration off LDAP as well. If Kerberos can pull
it's config information from LDAP, that'd be even better. (I think
Heimdal can do this, but I chose to go with MIT Kerberos).

For Ubuntu, the best way to do this would probably to write a web app
that backed on to dpkg/apt, and use or modify an existing LDAP front
end. This would give the flexibility of allowing users to use CLI, X, or
WWW front ends, and allow much easier migration to and from such a setup.

Also, given that almost all mail servers come out of box with support
(although not necessarily configuration), this would potentially make
virtual domain configuration a lot easier as well.

Regards
Edward Murrell


Toby Smithe wrote:
> On 9/4/06, Leen Toelen <toelen at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I have been a system administrator in a couple of startups now, and
>>> something that seems to be missing in the Linux universe is a very simple
>>> getting-started, all-in-one server distribution. There is a real need for a
>>> server OS where you simply pop in a CD, answer some questions, and have a
>>> working ldap server, email server with spam checking, dns server and so on.
>>> The feature set should be basic network management (dns/dhcp/samba
>>> domainserver/samba file server/email server), a web-based management
>>> interface (no need to learn all the config file quirks), and a web interface
>>> for some common tools (look at google for domains, squirrelmail, hula,
>>> spreadsheets). There have been projects before to make some of these
>>> services working together, but most of them were not (or could not be)
>>> integrated in the distributions. Such a distribution should be headless, and
>>> only managed using the web interface.
>>>
>>> Are there any plans in this direction, what are your opinions about it?
>>>       
>
> I would love something like this; e-mail servers are a pain to set up
> when you want to use MySQL authentication. However, I do believe that
> the easy LAMP set-up offered with Dapper was a step in the right
> direction.
>
>
> On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 11:12 -0400, Steve Barnhart wrote:
>   
>> There's Suse w/YaST which is *kinda* close to that, but I don't know
>> if a web-based interface exists, but all of that stuff is configured
>> with graphical tools or text-based (ncurses) tools.
>>     
>
> Graphical tools are no use for a headless server, unless one is doing
> remote X sessions, but that is a waste of resources. SSH-ing in is a
> solution, I agree, but not what the OP was looking for.
>