OT - WAY - OT

[Fairlight]

On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 10:25:49AM -0700, Bill Campbell may or may not have
proven themselves an utter git by pronouncing:
> 
> I *STRONGLY* suggest that people not use webmin/usermin on *nix systems
> without very carefully restricting access to them.  I have seen several

s/without.*$//

IMNSHO.

Webmin has had more compromises than I care to count over the years.

> Webmin has (had) some major issues in user administration where id doesn't
> check home directories for reasonable things.  It happily allowed somebody
> to create a user's $HOME as /home, then when they went to change it to
> /home/username, webmin created /home/usrname, then moved everything under
> /home to /home/username.

Advil, please?

> While I have hacked webmin to eliminate these problems, and sent the
> changes upstream, they had not been incorporated the last time I looked.

You don't use it though, do you?  I mean...you obviously have the skills to
not need it, so why would you?  Was it for someone else's system, where
they mandated it be there?

> I cannot say anything nice about the quality of the perl code in either of
> these products so, as my mother taught me, I won't say anything.

It's a bit better than some CGI I saw come out of the Ukraine.  That's
about as nice a thing as I can say about it.

I think, as a convenience, the concept might be valid.  Personally, I'd
actually rather run YaST or whatever setup tool a vendor releases on X11
over VNC if I felt the need for a GUI admin, than the headache of a CGI
based admin suite that doesn't cut it.

But I know people that have done SCO since Xenix days that can't do their
OSR5 (especially sendmail) without webmin, and insist it be there.  My
opinion is that if you -need- something like webmin, you should not
be adminning a *nix server, you should be running Windows or a Mac or
something.  When you can't do without webmin, literally cannot perform
configuration without it, you shouldn't be doing it.  I know this doesn't
at all apply to Bill, but there are too many others out there to whom it
does apply.

mark->
-- 
"Moral cowardice will surely be written as the cause on the death
certificate of what used to be Western Civilization." --James P. Hogan