----- Original Message ----- From: "Kyrre Nygård" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Tamouh H." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, August 25, 2006 10:44 AM Subject: RE: A webhosting script?
> At 19:09 25.08.2006, Tamouh H. wrote: > > >There are many control panels that do these sort of things. Some are > >free, others are not. > > > >Check WebMin, cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk, H-Sphere, RAQdevil.....and > >tons more. > > Hello Tamouh, yeah I know man but this is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. > > Not only are the visual and cognitive designs of these solutions so > bad I'd rather get > shot in the head than using them, they're also highly unnecessary. I agree that > some of the tasks they help people do might be too advanced for the > average Joe but > this is really not the way to go. > Before you start shooting down these solutions let an old hand here give you some advice. I am the top technical dog at a regional ISP here. Recently we acquired a snaller ISP. This ISP was obviously run by someone who thought like you do. I am in charge of the integration of their systems into our systems. We use webmin as a front end for our adminstrative stuff. This ISP we bought uses a custom-written solution. It is your typical webinterface on PHP that yakks to a mysql database. A series of scripts on the back end run every few minutes, sucking changes out of the mysql database and distributing them to the various systems, like the mailserver, authentication servers, etc. Among one of the little gems I discovered a week after we bought them was that the smart guy that wrote the front end had made a very simple little programming error. It was buried in the transfer script that is supposed to keep the mail and radius servers in synchronization with the mysql server. This front end has been in operation for years. It is at the point now were the mysql system is so far out of sync with the actual devices that there are -HUNDREDS- of customers getting free service that were turned off for non-payment, there are even more hundreds of customers listed in the accounting system that aren't in the actual systems, yadda yadda yadda. It is a holy fucking mess. So bad that in fact I'm doing a complete rush job on ash-canning all their systems and getting the customer base folded into our systems as quickly as possible. When you consider that all these freeloaders affected the ISPs calculations of how much circuit capacity they needed to buy, you might begin to understand the gravity of the situation. We are talking many thousands of dollars spent on keeping pipes from being overloaded by buying ever more circuit capacity, while meanwhile the revenue coming in kept going down. The only good thing about it was that I am pretty sure all this was why we were able to buy the ISP at all. If it had been run properly, they would have been much less interested in selling, I am sure. It is very much for want of a nail the war was lost. Solutions like Webmin that everybody uses may not look pretty. But they have thousands of administrators like me in the world who are banging on them, finding these little mistakes and getting the corrections put into the maintainers. There is absolutely no fucking way in hell that you, working alone in your little office, can even hope to approach the level of debugging that a program like Webmin has gone through. Everybody that runs an ISP or web farm today that knows their ass from a hole in the ground has scrapped their custom-written solutions and gone to a widely-used solution, whether commercial or open source, unless they are maybe the size of AOL. And I'd much rather not be working for an ISP like AOL that's losing more money every year than all the readers of this list put together would make in a lifetime. Ted _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"