[ Please do not top-post your replies. Top-posting fixed. ]
On Friday 26 August 2011 13:18:54 John wrote:
> > Wietse:
> > John:
> >> I do not want to start a flam war, but what are the thoughts on
> >> using webmin as a tool to administer postfix (+ dovecot, but
> >> that is outside this group).
> >
> > The following is not specific to GUIs, but applies to any program
> > that automatically parses and updates configuration. Be careful
> > about making changes by hand - the tool (GUI or otherwise) may
> > not understand everything.
> >
> My initial thought was to save my existing config, then use webmin
> to build a config and compare the two. if they are miles apart
> then drop the idea.
Oh, no, I would never consider something like that to be able to
generate a MTA configuration from scratch. It can only be as good as
the coder who wrote it, and do note, that individual is a programmer,
not a sysadmin. Those who are proficient at both are rare.
The best sort of admin GUI I have seen is Samba's SWAT. It presents a
basic interface with common settings, and can optionally show all
smb.conf(5) settings. If uncommon settings are added to the smb.conf
file, those will show up in the basic interface. Most important about
SWAT are the complete hyperlinks to the smb.conf documentation. Syntax
help and examples are right at your fingertips.
Something of that nature could rather easily be developed for Postfix,
since we already have excellent and complete HTML documentation (look
up anything_you_need in your own postconf.5.html#anything_you_need :
every possible setting has its own anchor in the document.) But AFAIK
no one has done this yet.
> Part of my reasoning here is that I am getting old and I need to
> farm out some of my work, most of the people that I have been
> asked to look at are not CLI literate and are not particularly
> keen on becoming so. TTYL
Webmin, such as it is, is probably fine for simple tasks you might
wish to delegate to non-technical people, such as user and alias
management. A person who does not understand a Unix CLI probably also
does not understand email, and for that person to be tinkering with
Postfix settings is a bad idea.
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