I've been doing some stuff with LDAP, and I've been following threads in various places about GUI configuration managers for Apache, and a light suddenly came on.
LDAP (and JNDI and friends) are most excellently designed for the kind of oddly-shaped trees that the Apache configuration is an example of, and there are getting to be quite a few tools for dealing with them. Apache's configuration be (optionally) constructed as a dbm dataset and schema that can be communicated via LDAP. In fact, this can be extended to the dynamically loaded modules etc. Instead of constructing a GUI based on a "proprietary" config file format that is also open to human editing errors, the original configuration and all subsequent configuration changes can be "guaranteed" to remain correct. There are some LDAP view/admin tools already available, and more coming. In some cases, reloading (kill -USR1) the server might not even be necessary to implement the change. If compiled in (as it is with PHP3), the LDAP (or direct gdbm) interface could interface directly with the Apache server environment. This has obvious scary implications, of course... Needless to say, this is probably an Apache V3 (V4??) type of change. Gary E. Bickford, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sr. Systems Administrator, Connect Schlumberger http://www.connect.slb.com
