Re: [school-discuss] linuxconf

[Michael Shigorin <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Oct 17, 2007 at 06:25:51AM -0700, marilyn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Here is a question for the system administrator folks.  

Well, some of us might advise you on starting new conversation by
composing a brand new message, not replying to another thread and
changing subject: there are message headers that will link them
together no matter what.

> Back in the days when I used Red Hat and Mandrake, I used a
> tool called linuxconf that was just great for my simple needs.

Nasty "tool", I've removed it off some RH5.1 (or 4.x?) as soon
as it gave me no choice but to either accept some unreviewable
changes to sendmail.cf or do something else but not let things be!

> Apache is installed and running, but I want to setup my
> webmastering students to access their own directories through
> ftp and ssh.  Ssh works, but not ftp.

FTP for webmastering is bad habit albeit very popular in the
wild.  In fact, it's sort of deadlock: those coming for hosting
expect FTP even if they'd prefer something better, and those
providing hosting have to provide FTP even if they'd eagerly
switch to something better.

At our free hosting for free software projects, we provide
rsync-over-ssh as r/w transport and consider any ftp to be
readonly anonymous access.

> Also, I want the kids to be able to run programs through ssh.
> Pine works fine, but it gives an xserver error when I try to
> run a GUI.

ssh -X host proggie
(for newer openssh, ssh -Y to retain complete X11 protocol,
not just screened/secured parts)

> Is there some tool like linuxconf for Debian?

I hope linuxconf is gone for good everywhere.

Regarding webmin, it's more competent indeed but still a security
nightmare (better than sendmail as well but having lots of perl
code, modules and interpreter running with root privileges makes
any of my security-conscious colleagues cringe).  Unfortunately
there's no way with it to do privilege separation with it AFAIK.

Yep, I know no sane remote administration UI that would do that.
There's work on ALTerator to bring it there but that's really 
not a trivial task as one might guess ;)

So over LAN, it's all no real problem usually; but still not 
a good habit, just like auth r/w FTP.

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