Peter Gutbrod wrote:
I was thinking that with the trouble you're having with mail an all, best you don't do remote admin at all:-)Sorry for the tripple posting :-(
Send it first through usenet and it didn't show up there.
Lotsa folk will tell you that the best admin tool is vi (or emacs); I use the former, but before we get into a three-week discussion of _that_, let me say "sensible-editor" is actually the best.
OTOH lots of others (some very important ones such as Bill) say you gotta have a GUI.
I won't go that far, thought I do think the argument has merit. I will say, though, that a well-constructed system of menus is hard to beat. It has the great merit of showing you what you can do, helping you do what you need to do so you get it right first time, every time.
I don't actually know of such a product; linuxconf is an effort in that direction, but Red Hat dropped it (after I did), and I've not seen much discussion of it here so I figure most folks don't use it.
Another product with the same sort of idea is webmin. It uses a web interface, and has a system of menus. It doesn't look very pretty (except maybe to Jamie), but then I expect it will work with any browser you choose to like.
webmin is packaged for Debian. Webmin is also easy to extend (if you can code comprehensibly in Perl), and there's a lot of third-party modules for it.
I suspect that a lot of its modules don't let you configure every aspect of every sofware (or hardware) component , but then most people don't want to.
And, of course, if you insist you can tunnel webmin's traffic through ssh.
Now if webmin supports FreeBSD (and I'm sure it does), and allows you to configure what you need to do (or can easily be made to do so), then I guess it's pretty much a dead heat as to which is easier to maintain.
No, I once read half a two-part article by somone on why FreeBSD is better than Linux, and he rattled on about real Unix tools rather than upstart-new GNU tools (I quite like being able to do this:
ls * -dog
rather than
ls -d * # I don't know what the "real" equivs to -o -g are, iff they exist)
and how it's better to build from source for _your_ system. I got news for you fella: If I'm paying you by the hour, I'd rather you spent five minutes downloading binaries built for _my_ system by someone else than an hour or three building it yourself.
_ALL_ the main Linux vendors have binaries built for distroes they ship, and in some cases (probably all) there are trustworthy third-parties that build more.
That is especially true of Debian.
--
Cheers John
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