Virtual host management software

Every server owner/admin would like to have a simple and easy to use server management software. Everyone knows Plesk as it's widely used and seems to be one of the most popular commercial versions of server/virtual host managers. Last 2 days I've been trying ISPconfig, a open source virtual hosting control panel. And I'm impressed. A little at least.

With every good software, you will not have any issues with the install. With this one, I spent 12 hours of time drinking coffee and praying. Running Debian on my server I'm used to get everything through aptitude. Yes, I know, No real "root" uses any fancy automated installation systems and compiles everything step by step from the source. But, this junk has so many dependencies that a .deb would be more than welcome. From their website I found my distro being supported and got a list of requirements:

* Operating System: Linux (Kernel 2.4 or later with glibc6)
* Apache Webserver version 1.3.12 or later / 2.0.40 or later
* Sendmail or Postfix
* Procmail
* Quota Package
* ProFTP as standalone version or vsftpd as inetd/xinetd/standalone version
* Php 4.0.5 or newer as Apache module
* MySQL data base
* a POP3/IMAP daemon that supports either the traditional Unix-Mailbox format (e.g. gnu-pop3d, qpopper, ipop3d, popa3d or vm-pop3d) or the Maildir format (e.g. Courier-Imap)
* OpenSSL and mod_ssl for the creation of SSL virtual hosts
* BIND8 / BIND9
* iptables or ipchains

This is easy, right? Sure: You also need to install spamassassin, gcc, g++, Net::DNS (a perl module) and so on. But OK, why not do some boring waiting. So i did. After 12 hours and several findings of missing software packets/libs I got it working. Now to the surprise: It actually works. A bad mash-up of code, ugly interface and too complicated logic but it works. Investigating how it works, I found that it seems to be messy. But it works :)

More about it later as I'm going to try to build a light easy implement version of it.

J