Linuxconf?

[Edward Glowacki]

Yesterday on my way home from work I thought, "Wouldn't it be great
to have a nice console tool for managing my Linux box?"  Today I
was searching and came across Linuxconf.  I played around with the
web demo, but that's *definately* not what I want, especially the
part about opening a socket to the world... Bad Things(tm).  Has
anyone used the console interface to Linuxconf, and if so, is it
any good?  If not, are there any console interfaces to something
similar that could manage network, services, firewall, filesystem
mounting, etc.?  (This would be primarily for my laptop, but
it might be nice to have at home too in case I wanted to test
some stuff without having the boot-time delay starting it every time.)

I'm hoping to keep most things on one screen, though maybe have 
some sub-screens for big categories like network services if they
grow out of hand.  The key here is to keep it fairly simple, so 
theoretically I could show up at a LUG meeting (heheh, nice thought,
isn't it? ;) ), plug in, start DHCP, then start Zope so that someone
else in the room can play around with it for a bit.

Here's what I see in my mind's eye:

=======================
10:58AM  up 48 days, 18:07, 10 users, load averages: 1.39, 1.34, 1.39
The network is DOWN.  IP address = 0.0.0.0
    Load configuration      [work] [home] [dialup]
    Start network using     [eth0/DHCP] [eth0/static] [ppp0]
    Firewall is INACTIVE.   [activate firewall]
    SSHD is running.        [stop SSHD] [restart SSHD]
    Apache is NOT running.  [start Apache]
    Zope is NOT running.    [start Zope]
    FTP is NOT running.     [start FTP]
    NFS is NOT running.     [start NFS]
    AFS is NOT mounted.     [mount AFS]
lpd is RUNNING.             [stop lpd]
APM is ENABLED.             [disable APM]
Packages updated 2001/03/07             [update packages now]
Data directory last synced 2001/03/07   [sync data directory now] 
========================

The interface would be built maybe with "dialog", or if that won't
give me the control I need, then curses or s-lang.  Everything in
[] are buttons: [button] [another button]. Buttons that start services
could possibly also poke appropriate holes in the firewall, or
maybe a second button would do that, who knows.

-- 
Edward Glowacki			glowack2@msu.edu
Michigan State University	
"...a partial solution to the right problem is better than a complete
solution to the wrong one." (http://uiweb.com/issues/issue14.htm)