OT - WAY - OT

[Bill Campbell]

On Sat, Mar 22, 2008, Fairlight wrote:
>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.

Agreed.

>> 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 don't use it, but have ISP customers who have used my hacked
version so their people can add/modify/delete customer accounts.
I set them with a *VERY* restricted set of modules, automatic
home directory generation, etc. before letting them loose on it.

>> 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.

I don't have a general problem with GUI or Web based admin tools, and find
them hand for things I do rarely.  The best ones generate shell commands,
and display or log them where they can be found to figure out what's really
going on under the hood (IBM's SMIT was/is great for this).

On the other hand, I've been building a fresh OSR 5.0.6a system this week
as a possible fall-back to a production system, and find it easier to edit
/etc/default/tcp to define gateway and name server addresses than to figure
out where scoadmin is hiding the configuration.  I find it frustrating to
remember commands that I only use every five years or so.

Nobody should have to deal with sendmail at all.  When we first connected
to the Internet in 1991, my first project was to get an SMTP Mail server
that was not sendmail, because (a) it was the Unix equivalent of Windows as
a security risk, and (b) the only modem noise I speak is perl.  We used
smail-3.x for years, shifting to postfix about 7 years ago.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676

    Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
 for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.