[GLLUG] web hosting control

[Mike Rambo]

Lansing Schools is looking for something to ease management of the 
district web server. What is desired is to be able to hand off some 
level of web site configuration to staff at some of the local schools 
(ie. the netadmin at sexton be able to administrate all web sites that 
are derivatives of programs at sexton etc.) without district admins 
needing to make every change that has to be made.

We have found a commercial product called cpanel (cpanel.net) that 
appears to do this but I have reservations because it is closed. It 
works with apache, php, mysql etc but does so in such a way that it 
obscures what is happening behind the curtains and also appears to 
heavily modify many aspects of the server (to the point that they 
recommned to wipe and rebuild the server to uninstall).

Does anyone know of any open solutions that use standard off the shelf 
apache (and other) packages to accomplish this? Freshmeat supplied a few 
possibles (web-cp, vhost, Domain Technologie Control, host4net) some of 
which are more complete than others but I wondered what folks on the 
list might recommend.

Thanks.


-- 
Mike Rambo
mrambo at lsd.k12.mi.us

Windows will always suck until it is installed on vacuum cleaners!