[Openvds-devel] Control Panels

[Clint Nelissen]

There has been a big discussion on the control panel development in
OpenVSD and I guess I need to better illustrate my point.

There is already a great groundwork laid out for the control panels in
the VSD protocol, that I believe can be used to develop a set of very
useful administration scripts to be used by both network administrators,
system administrators, and end users alike. I think we should try to use
this protocol wherever possible. Now, there are many many ways to go
about doing so, we can do them in the form of a CLI, which has already
been done and works great, the only downfall being that not everyone is
comfortable with CLI, nor does everyone want their clients to have
telnet/SSH access to their machines. There has also been talks of doing
some kind of Windows App for administration, the only problem with this
being that not everyone runs Windows, and there are always problems with
the systems that you are running them on, such as version conflicts and
the like. A web-based solution is the only feasible solution that gives
you the functionality you need as well as staying platform independent.

In my opinion we need to create a unified and "official" control panel
system to be used with OpenVSD, that is automatically generated with the
installation of the scripts. The benefits of creating one supported
control panel are as follows:

1 - You only have to support one codebase. Anyone who contributes or
wants to contribute is only working with one model and not several. Also
supporting the scripts is alot easier if you know that everyone is
dealing with the same model.

2 - Documentation for the scripts becomes easier as there is only one
control panel to write documentation for.

3 - Through the use of web-based scripts, many features and
functionality can be worked in to make the product more appealing to end
users, such as a web-based telnet/ssh client as found in webmin, as well
as a web-based file manager so end users can administer their sites from
anywhere with an Internet connection. This functionality does not then
have to be migrated to another medium, such as if we were developing
several types of interfaces.

4 - Many users of other systems are already accustomed to using
web-based scripts, so companies migrating from another solution (such as
Ensim, or Cobalt) do not have problems with their end-users not being
able to administer their sites.

5 - Web-based administration scripts can use functionality beyond the
scope of the VSD protocol, such as Java applications, DHTML
applications, CGI and Perl applications, as well as any third party
modules that someone wants to add to them. For instance, if someone
wants to add a bulletin board plug-in to their skel, they can easily
integrate the UBB control panels into the VSD control panel for a
unified customer control panel.

There is no reason to redefine the research that many companies have
already done. Large companies such as Cobalt, Sphera, Ensim, and even
Idaya have integrated a web-based solution because it is the easiest to
work with as well as being the easiest to support and develop. We would
be fools to think that there is any other platform that will satisfy all
of these needs as efficiently.

Here is what I propose. Let us make up a team of developers, which I
would like to volunteer for, to create an official set of administration
scripts to be included in the next version. These scripts will be the
only scripts supported by the OpenVSD project (as far as documentation
and mailing list support). Other people are more than welcome to create
some other types of applications to serve a particular need if they so
choose, but maintaining their codebase is their responsibility. This
will make the development of the control panels more efficient and in
the end more useful and user-friendly.

I would like to hear your criticism on the proposed idea, as well as
anyone that would like to volunteer for it.

Thank you.

Clint Nelissen - Technician
Digital Internet Services Corporation
Phone - 760-776-0800 x 300
Fax - 760-776-0076
http://www.dis.net