Hi,

My current hosts are poo so I'm thinking of moving back in-house until I can afford decent hosting (rackspace bsd hopefully). The problem I have is I will lose Cpanel and WHM.

I was wondering whether there were any modules in this area. I'm finding it hard to find an open source control panel - http://webcp.can-host.com is the only one I can find. Maybe I'm not searching well enough but there seems to be a gap in the open source world for a decent control panel.

My ex-ISP friend's written a control panel so will be helping me write one and has suggested that it would be good to do it in separate modules - one for FTP, one for mail, etc.

So, if anyone knows of any existing stuff I can use, or is interested in helping to do this then let me know :)

Cheers,

Steve

Personally, inhouse is pretty much the only way I do it anymore. Or I'm hosted on a box that I know and trust. I'm usually the admin anyway in exchange for web space and bandwidth. Good trade for me and the box owner that way.

I thought Cpanel and the like was OS and available to anyone? I haven't used it except to get a few people out of a jam. There are a slew of GUIs for admin but they also do a lot more than web hosting accounts.

It isn't really a gap but other things: stand alone boxes aren't typically hosting thousands of nameless accounts, and that when you know how, GUIs just get in the way and limiting.

By the time you design one from scratch you can learn how to mix and match manual methods and do it faster. SSH, SFTP, and a remote text editor is enough for most things.

Suggest having someone with enough knowhow to get it set-up and secure and leave you with enough control (as a non root user) to do whatever you want easily.

There are a lot of admin tools out there and maybe some CPanel like thingies. On a local or VPN accessible server you can get it set-up and maintain it pretty comfortably.

Have a look at Webmin or Webadmin, they may be what you're after!

Thanks for the replies!

Cpanel/Ensim/etc. all cost dollar :(

I guess the main functions I'd like people to have access to are adding and removing pop email accounts, seeing how much disk space they have used, and webstats, the latter of which should be easy to plug in.

It's OK setting up email accounts manually myself for people, but would be better to give them the control, less calling me all the time :)

Steve

Have you tried a search on Freshmeat ?
It's amazing the amount of OSS projects that site has catalogued. It might take a while to find what you want, but you'll probably save much time over writing your own or having to adapt something that's not quite right.

And the search itself is a pleasant way to kill a few hours

Dennis

If you want to host in a Win environment, it might be worth to examine Zee-Way's ZPanel.

Cheers.

Hi,

Thanks for the link, but I wouldn't host on Windows :)

BSD all the way!

Steve

Well I've decided to roll my own as my host has been down now practically all weekend and most of today :(

Exim and teapop set up now so will write a few features like adding mail addresses, adding virtual servers, etc. and post the results back here when done - I'm sure a few people will find it useful.

tata for now,

Steve