* * * * *

                                Control panels

I am not a fan of control panels.

Oh, I can understand why C is using them; there's no mucking around with
configuration files, and it's easier to train someone to use administrate a
system using this click-n-drool interface than it is to use the command line
(“What's that?”). But—and it may be the control panel software we're using—
it's restrictive. Way restrictive.

How restrictive?

Here's the configuration of one of our webservers, as given by the control
panel:

ServerName      server.example.net
Port    80
SSL Port        443
ServerAdmin     [email protected]
StartServers    8
MaxClients      150
HostnameLookups on

That's it.

Simple, huh?

You might not realize we're using Apache 2.0 [1] given the simplicity of the
configuration file. Oh, and if you want to edit the configuration? Those
fields above? They're the only ones you can change through the control panel.

And what does the website administrator see as the configuration?

ServerName      www.example.com
ServerAdmin     [email protected]
DocumentRoot    /website/html

Good thing Apache supports user level configuration files [2].

Granted, most sites won't have a configuration beyond this basic setup. But
heaven help you if you want something a bit more complex. Or (for whatever
reason) don't (or can't) do what you want through the user level
configuration files.

And that's just the configuration of the webserver using the control panel.

For instance, a simple operation of renaming a domain. Under the command
line, you may need to rename a directory (for instance, this site [3] is
stored under a directory called boston.conman.org, change a few lines in the
Apache configuration file and update DNS (Domain Name Service). Under this
control panel we have? Looks like you have to create a whole new account,
then have the user (who will have a new userid because … well … that's the
way it's done) upload the site (and unless he has a copy of it himself, he'll
have to download a copy from the old site). Then, once everything is changed
over (oh, he has a database too—he'll need to recreate that as well) then we
can go in a remove the old site.

Yup, that's certainly better.

Or you could muck around the server on the command line and copy the files
that way, but I've been there, done that, still having support issues [4]
because of the way the control panel works (and my trying not to break things
too badly by using the command line).

Okay, I'll stop griping now.

[1] http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/directives.html
[2] http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/configuring.html#htaccess
[3] https://boston.conman.org/
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2004/11/22.2

Email author at [email protected]

You are viewing proxied material from gopher.conman.org. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.