Re: a tool for system administration
On Fri, Jul 23, 1999 at 03:19:57PM +0200, Francisco Javier Gaztelua Odriozola wrote:
> IMHO the most important features that Unix and Unix-like systems lack
> nowadays are: a standard and powerfull GUI & IDE (a-la NextStep) and a
> standard and useful graphical administration tool. While there are some
I have an idea for such a tool for Debian. For the example i'll call it
debconf.
Firstly, a GUI. (duh :)
Then, every Debian package that has a config file(s) also has a debconf.conf
file that describes how the .conf for the package should look like. Different
types of config files can use the same lib and GUI, like:
- Apache and proftpd for example have very similar config file type.
- Squid uses a very basic type: "var value"
- sshd and Samba have similar config types: [Section header], var = value
Then, all the package maintainers just need to learn the format of
debconf.conf for their package(s) and write them up.
One could also write up a small secure daemon to enable remote configuration
(NT doesn't even have that). Secure communications would of course be
preferable.
Are there maybe projects like this underway already? I haven't played with
linuxconf before, but after a glance at its site I get the impression it's
commercial and does a lot more than needed.
I'll probably start work on something like this myself, but my knowledge of C
is VERY limited and I doubt you'd want something like this written in Perl :).
I am however planning to learn C in the very near future (/me pats his "The C
Programming Language").
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