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Re: RedHat control panel?

On Thu, 24 Oct 1996, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:

> What about web-based config managers?  

yes, web based config tools are much better - they can be used in X
(with netscape or mosaic or chimera etc) and in text mode with lynx (as
long as the HTML is written so that it looks good in text mode)

The only problem is that they would depend on installation of apache or
cern. IMO a small price to pay.  

a web browser could provide the front end/user interface; perl or c
programs for the cgi stuff (generating html, processing input etc), and
the modification of system configuration files/scripts could be done with
a macro processing language such as m4 - similar to the way that sendmail
is configured.

what i am envisioning is based around having:

  1. a file called /etc/hostconfig which contains a lot of m4 macro
     definitions - this file can be manipulated through the web
     interface. also, since it's plain text it can just as easily be
     edited with vi, or a scripting language such as perl, or awk.

  2. have a set of 'templates' (m4 scripts) for various system which
     #include /etc/hostconfig. Some of these will require their own m4
     definitions files as well as /etc/hostconfig.

  3. a set of cgi scripts which provide an interface (and access controls)
     to manipulating /etc/hostconfig etc.

  4. a Makefile to control generation of "live" config files (as used by
     the programs being configured) from the m4 files. If this lived in
     it's own directory under /etc, each package could have it's own
     <packagename>.make file which is automatically included in the top
     level makefile.

     This would allow easy global changes of a system's configuration just
     by editing a couple of text files (with vi or via a web browser) and
     typing 'make'.

     individual packages could be reconfigured just as easily by editing
     their specific m4 file and typing <packagename>.make. It should be
     quite simple to have a web form with a button which executes the
     make.


summary:

the whole idea is text-file and command-line based, with web interface
layered on top. It's generic - any debian package can make use of this
config system just by including m4 templates and scripts.

    /etc/hostconfig     -- top level config file.  contains system wide
                           config details. e.g. booleans used by
                           /etc/rc.boot to decide what to run at boot
                           time, hostname, ip address, etc.  Anything 
                           needed at boot time or used by many programs.

    /etc/config  
      /etc/config/templates  -- m4 templates for individual programs
      /etc/config/makefiles  -- top level Makefile & makefiles for
                                individual packages
      /etc/config/bin        -- any programs needed for the autoconfig
                                process, e.g. cgi to handle HTML form for
                                /etc/hostconfig


None of this depends on m4 - it could be done with common tools like
perl or awk or even sh. However, m4 seems particularly well suited to
this sort of application.


None of this, btw, is thought out in great detail - it's just a broad
outline of something that could work.



> Can they be made as secure as an X manager?

can use .htacess to control access, possibly limit access to 127.0.0.1
by default (but allow override by sysadmin if they need to configure
several machines remotely)

SSL would prevent snooping - but i expect that you know a lot more about
apache-ssl than i do :)

Craig

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