Web GUI for server administration

[Onno Benschop]

On 29/05/08 06:33, Onno Benschop wrote:
> I'm a member of the Ubuntu Server team and I'll raise this issue at our
> next weekly meeting (we just had our meeting 30 minutes ago).
>
> If there are specific concerns that you wish to raise, can you please
> email me with the concern and a reference and I'll endeavour to put
> together a statement which I'll post here before I take it to the Ubuntu
> Server team
This issue was raised in today's ubuntu-server meeting.

The discussion was fruitful in that a number of items were discussed:

   1. Webmin is a tool that works, but it has the capacity for shooting
      yourself in the foot. It is very powerful, but the user base for a
      web GUI is generally not the same as a low-level administrator,
      which means that while it's fine for an experienced administrator,
      it's not too careful to protect others. It's options are very
      detailed and require lots of skill with little or no way to
      recover from mistakes.
   2. eBox is a tool that has a higher level view of administration
      tasks. It was acknowledged that it is still not feature complete,
      but many essential tasks can be accomplished today. Further
      development by the ubuntu-server team and others is already under
      way. It was suggested that eBox is more of a Ubuntu-like tool.
   3. A side by side comparison has not been made to date and a simple
      summary does not yet exist to our knowledge. Some team members
      expressed interest in furthering that.
   4. A Debian package is distributed from the webmin site, but you
      should be aware that it is *not* a Ubuntu package and it will and
      cannot be supported.
   5. Debian's webmin maintainer asked to remove the packages back in
      December of 2005 and it was removed from Debian unstable in
      January 2006. It was last published in Ubuntu as version 1.230-1
      in Dapper in December 2005.

I am personally not aware of any discussions that were had about webmin
vs. eBox, but I'm confident that at some level they were had. While the
ubuntu-server team existed during that time, I believe that it only
became active when Canonical hired a bunch of developers a year ago and
became responsible for a server product.


This won't answer all your questions, but I hope it provides some
background to your discussions and considerations.

Personally I would encourage you to investigate eBox and to log any bugs
for missing or faulty functionality. If you are a developer, please feel
free to submit patches.

Note that due to the high level of traffic on this list, I am no longer
subscribed. Please CC me if you require any response. I'll endeavour to
monitor this particular thread for the next week.

-- 
Onno Benschop

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